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
mean giving enemy
Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it.
kings royalty aspect
Aspect are within us, and who seems most kingly is king.
family flesh faces
I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on.
beautiful age ugly
A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
poetry world might
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
years office decision
The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
passion hands fancy
She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.
often-is giving may
Some women's love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's license to receive it.
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.
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.
stars sound tess
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
queens kings men
Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.
stories moral parables
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?
cells littles noise
That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the center of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it.