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
communion ought
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
romance ends
All romances end at marriage.
curves nerves ease
Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.
poetry world might
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
dialect beast mark
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
novelists poet shows
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.
kissing wells
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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.
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.
tess-of-the-d-urbervilles tricks novel
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…
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.