Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, OMwas an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. Charles Dickens was another important influence. Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 June 1840
distance hands suffering
...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
feelings language silent
He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
eye rivers numbers
The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-'Why do ye trouble me with your looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!
long use roger
By experience", says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for further travel, and of what use is our experience to us then?
sake three quarters
Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?
strength strong-women tess-of-the-d-urbervilles
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
husband mean mind
Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.
dream weather plies
WEATHERS This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly; And the little brown nightingale bills his best, And they sit outside at 'The Traveller's Rest,' And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest, And citizens dream of the south and west, And so do I. This is the weather the shepherd shuns, And so do I; When beeches drip in browns and duns, And thresh and ply; And hill-hid tides throb, throe on throe, And meadow rivulets overflow, And drops on gate bars hang in a row, And rooks in families homeward go, And so do I.
kings dramatic-life life-is
Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
disappointment loss desire
There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.
firsts causes sage
The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.
experience measurement should
Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
flesh faces oblivion
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
world earth cold
That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.