Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” Quotes (41 Quotes)

As soon as she could discern the outline of the house, it had all its old effect upon Tess's imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables, the broken courses of brick which topped the chimney, all had something in common with her personal character.

Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks…

The stage of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their personalities warmly through the room.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Many...have learned that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.

They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.

Behind him the hill are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don't you think so?

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze.

Never in her life - she could swear it from the bottom of her soul - had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

What woman, indeed, among the most faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in her own children, or would not throw her theology to the wind if weighed against their happiness?

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order

He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears...

She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct.

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.

He made close acquaintance with phenomena he had before known but darkly - the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her-doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope....

I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best what my punishment ought to be; only - only - don't make it more than I can bear!

Tess was awake before dawn - at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

That innate love of melody, which she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.

A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed body and soul.

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.

La bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno molto sentito, non risiedeva nelle cose ma in ciò che esse simboleggiavano

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.She knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint if day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.