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Tess of the D’Urbervilles Quotes
When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
…our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
So do flux and reflux–the rhythm of change–alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
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
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
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
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
The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service proceeded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that she could come to church no more.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
[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
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
I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
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
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
…the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving.
— Thomas Harris, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
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 had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Let truth be told – women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
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
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare. To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should know. She thought every line in the contour of his person the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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
Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?””Yes.””All like ours?””I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.””Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?””A blighted one.
— Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
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