“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.”
Thomas Hardy“Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!”
Thomas Hardy, Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far from the Madding Crowd“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.”
Thomas Hardy“Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.”
Thomas Hardy“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.”
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes“I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, 'Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”
Thomas Hardy, Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy“Her suspense was terrible.”
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge“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.”
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge“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.”
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge“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.”
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge“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.”
Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge