"Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them."

"Done because we are too many."

"If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone."

"When women are secret they are secret indeed and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover."

"It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting outof love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as ashort cut that way, but it has been known to fail."

"He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things."

"To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience..."

"I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!"

"Life with a man is more businesslike after it, and money matters work better. And then, you see, if you have rows, and he turns you out of doors, you can get the law to protect you, which you can't otherwise, unless he half-runs you through with a knife, or cracks your noddle with a poker. And if he bolts away from you--I say it friendly, as woman to woman, for there's never any knowing what a man med do-- you'll have the sticks o' furniture, and won't be looked upon as a thief."

"To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world is almost a palpable movement. To enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night, and, having first expanded with a sense of difference from the mass of civilized mankind, who are diregardful of all such proceedings at this time, long and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars."

"Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure."

"An average woman is in this superior to an average man-that she never instigates, only responds."

"You have never loved me as I love you--never--never! Yours is not a passionate heart--your heart does not burn in a flame! You are, upon the whole, a sort of fay, or sprite-- not a woman!"

"The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling."

"You are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness."

"Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?''That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel."

"She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end."

"Love lives on propinquity but dies on contact."

"Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong."

"Experience is as to intensity and not as to duration."

"My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading."

"If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do."

"Geoffrey's own heart felt inconveniently large just then."

"Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown."

"She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun."

"They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men."

"It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin."

"There's a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating."

"Fear is the mother of foresight."

"Good but not religious-good."

"This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam."

"The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes."

"I have been thinking that the social moulds civilisation fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...."

"On the morning appointed for her departure Tess awoke before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute save for one prophetic bird, who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence, as if equally convinced that he is mistaken."

"If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways-not in my heart. The worst women are those vain in their hearts, and not in their ways."

"Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences."

"Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?"

"What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it's only one!"

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

"That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!"

"People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort."

"The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job."

"I know women are taught by other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct. The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go unlamented to her grave."

"He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!"

"And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape."

"All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight."

"If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later."

"It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies. You may ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should-- I am a fit subject, no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew"--he nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same."

"If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man."