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
eye curves years
You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
half forgotten impression
She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.
suits lovers sin
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.
eye littles tess-of-the-d-urbervilles
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
eye sun rays
It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
tess-of-the-d-urbervilles tricks novel
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
two gravitation
Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
pieces tess-of-the-d-urbervilles pity
O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
soul sin judgment
Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?
girl advantage
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
sex men suffering
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.
years long extinction
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
came dreaming nature offered peace release soft unto wood
Unto this wood I came As to a nest; Dreaming that sylvan peace Offered the harrowed ease- Nature a soft release From men's unrest
floors
Where once we danced, where once we sang, Gentlemen, / The floors are shrunken, cobwebs hang.