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
believe childhood half
You overrate my capacity of love. I don't posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me.
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.
girl advantage
You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.
way felt
I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
girl men sensitive
--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...
dream surroundings
But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small.
children mean thinking
The beggarly question of parentage--what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.
You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.
communion ought
We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
sensual ethereal inhuman
you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.
men another-man
Always wanting another man than your own.
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.
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.
years long extinction
A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.