“But there were certain early days in Casterbridge- days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests-when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.”

“Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!”

“I shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all.”

“Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.”

“Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.”

“I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”

“Her suspense was terrible.”

“If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later.”

“And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.”

“The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.”

“The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling.”