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Tess of the D'Urbervilles QUOTES

Tess of the D'Urbervilles QUOTES

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

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

2 " 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! "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

3 " It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

4 " Joan Durbeyfield always manged to find consolation somewhere: 'Well, as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with 'en, if she plays her trump car aright. And if he don't marry her afore he will after. For that he's all afire wi' love for her any eye can see.'
'What's her trump card? Her d'Urberville blood, you mean?'
'No, stupid; her face - as 'twas mine. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

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

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

6 " [She] soon perceived that as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women were also wandering in their gait. . . . Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

7 " How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no — they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

8 " He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

9 " 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

10 " 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

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

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

12 " 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

13 " 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

14 " When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

15 " Meanwhile, the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly -the thought of the world's concern at her situation- was found on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

16 " ...the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving. "

― Thomas Harris , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

17 " In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

18 " Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements but as to their subjective experiences. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

19 " 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. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles

20 " Some of the dairy people, who were also out of doors on the first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her contented pauses, the occassional laugh upon which her soul seemed to ride - the laugh of a woman in company with the man she loves and has won from all other women - unlike anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her tread, like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted. "

― Thomas Hardy , Tess of the D'Urbervilles