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
dialect beast mark
Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
fate indulge-in looks
Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
color ideas intuition
Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.
done hours possibility
Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.
stress feelings lines
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
clouds brightness sinister
...she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its brightness.
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.
would-be paradise ifs
Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
wish want fancy
But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.
mouths tone alive
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die. (from "Neutral Tones")
strong-women self practice
Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.
kissing wells
You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.
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.