Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy OM (June 2 1840 – January 11 1928) was an English novelist, short story writer and poet.

Quotes

Desperate Remedies (1871)

To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience.
- Vol. 1, ch. 1

With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.
- Vol. 1, ch. 1

It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.
- Vol. 2, ch. 4

Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.
- Ch. 1

Good, but not religious-good.
- Ch. 2

A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)

For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.
- Ch. 9

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
- Ch. 1

The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement.
- Ch. 2

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction — every kind of evidence in the logician's list — have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation.
- Ch. 2

Love is a possible strength, in an actual weakness. Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
- Ch. 4

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be — and whenever I look up, there will be you.
- Ch. 4 (Gabriel Oak, proposing to Bathsheba Everdene)

A nice unparticular man.
- Ch. 8

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
- Ch. 51

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)

Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.
- Ch. 1

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
- Ch. 2

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
- Ch. 9

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all. Circumspection and devotion are a contradiction in terms.
- Ch. 20

You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!
- Ch. 20

I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.
- Ch. 20

The Return of the Native (1878)

Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.
- Bk. I, ch. 1

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale.
- Bk. I, ch. 1

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.
- Bk. I, ch. 1

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
- Bk. I, ch. 1

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
- Bk. I, ch. 1

Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.
- Bk. I, ch. 2

To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.
- Bk. I, ch. 7

"Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!"
- Bk. II, ch. 4

The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.
- Bk. III, ch. 2

A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.
- Bk. III, ch. 2

The heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present. They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist, which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one.
- Bk. IV, ch. 1

When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.
- Bk. V, ch. 2

There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!
- Bk. V, ch. 3

How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?
- Bk. V, ch. 3

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.
- Bk. VI, ch. 1

Two on a Tower (1882)

If you are cheerful, and wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of all the sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible.
- Vol 1, ch. 4 (Swithin St Cleeve speaking to Viviette Constantine)

See what deceits love sows in honest minds!
- Vol 2, ch. 1 (Viviette Constantine speaking to Swithin St Cleeve)

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.
- Ch. 1

And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!
- Ch. 18

One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
- Ch. 20

Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!
- Ch. 41

But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.
- Ch. 44

That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. And that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground. And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. And that nobody is wished to see my dead body. And that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. And that no flours be planted on my grave. And that no man remember me.
- Ch. 45 (Henchard's will)

Her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.
- Ch. 45 (last lines)

The Woodlanders (1887)

It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
- Ch. I

In truth, her ante-nuptial regard for Fitzpiers had been rather of the quality of awe towards a superior being than of tender solicitude for a lover.
- Ch. XII

All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands.
- Ch. XIX

By the time that Melbury reached the park, he was prepared to go any lengths in combating this rank and reckless errantry of his daughter's husband. He would fetch home Edgar Fitzpiers to-night by some means, rough or fair: in his view there could come of his interference nothing worse than what existed at present. And yet to every bad there is a worse.
- Ch. XXXIV

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

A novel is an impression, not an argument.
- Preface to the Fifth Edition (July 1892)

'Twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o' place.
- Phase the First: The Maiden, ch. I

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.
- Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIII

She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.
- Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIII

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.
- Phase the Second: Maiden No More, ch. XIV

Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.
- Phase the Third: The Rally, ch. XVIII

Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"
- Phase the Third: The Rally, ch. XX

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.
- Phase the Third: The Rally, ch. XXIV

Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
- Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays, ch. XLIII

So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment.
- Phase the Sixth: The Convert, ch. XLIII

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"
- Phase the Sixth: The Convert, ch. XLVI

Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.
- Phase the Sixth: The Convert, ch. XLVII

"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.
- Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment, ch. LIX (last lines)

Jude the Obscure (1895)

But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
- Pt. I, ch. IV

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.
- Pt. I, ch. IX [Of a wedding]

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.
- Pt. I, ch. XI

Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.
- Pt. IV, ch. V

The beggarly question of parentage — what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom.
- Pt. V, ch. II (Jude speaking)

Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!
- Pt. V, ch. VIII (Phillotson speaking)

Done because we are too menny.
- Pt. VI, ch. II

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!
- Pt. VI, ch. III

Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"
- "Hap", ll. 1-4 (1866)

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
- "Hap", ll. 13-14 [1]

I look into my glass,
   And viewing wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
   My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then, I, undistrest
   By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
   With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
   Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
   With throbbings of noontide.
- "I Look Into My Glass"

William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!
- "Friends Beyond", ll. 1-3 [2]

Like chastened children sitting silent in a school.
- "Nature's Questioning", st. 1

You may prate of your prowess in lusty times,
But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays,
And see too well your crimes!
- "San Sebastian", st. 4

Yet saw he something in the lives
Of those who'd ceased to live
That rounded them with majesty
Which living failed to give.
- "The Casterbridge Captains", st. 6

Those house them best who house for secrecy.
- "Heiress and Architect", st. 6

For winning love we win the risk of losing,
And losing love is as one's life were riven.
- "Revulsion", st. 2

Numb as a vane that cankers on its point,
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came.
- "She, to Him", III, ll. 9–10

Love is lovelier
The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise.
- "She, to Him", IV, ll. 13–4

For incensed love breathes quick and dies,
When famished love a-lingering lies.
- "The Two Men", st. 10

O, doth a bird deprived of wings
Go earth-bound wilfully!
- "The Impercipient", st. 5

When Lawyers strive to heal a breach,
And Parsons practise what they preach.
- "The Sergeant's Song", st. 1

All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.
- "A Sign-Seeker", st. 5

"Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads;
Yet at mothy curfew-tide,
And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads,
They've a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide.
- "Friends Beyond", st. 2

Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

     How fares the Truth now?—Ill?
   —Do pens but slily further her advance?
   May one not speed her but in phrase askance?
- "Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden", st. 3 (27 June 1897)

     Still rule those minds on earth
  At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled:
   ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world
Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?
- "Lausanne: In Gibbon’s Old Garden", st. 4

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
   Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
   That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
   Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew —
   Fresh from his Wessex home —
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
   The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
   Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
   Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
   Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
   His stars eternally.
- "Drummer Hodge", ll. 1-18 (1899) [3]

Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
- "On a Fine Morning", ll. 1-7 (1899) [4]

Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.
- "Between Us Now", ll. 21-24 [5]

I leant upon a coppice gate
   When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
   The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
   Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
   Had sought their household fires.
- "The Darkling Thrush", ll. 1-8 (29 December 1900) [6]

At once a voice outburst among
   The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
   Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
   In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
   Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.
- "The Darkling Thrush", ll. 17-32

The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not.
- "God-Forgotten", ll. 4-8 [7]

Let him to whose ears the low-voiced Best seems stilled by the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here.
- "In Tenebris" ("De Profundus"), ll. 37-40 [8] [9]

O fatuous man, this truth infer,
Brides are not what they seem;
Thou lovest what thou dreamest her;
I am thy very dream!
- "The Well-Beloved", st. 13

As newer comers crowd the fore,
   We drop behind.
—We who have laboured long and sore
   Times out of mind,
And keen are yet, must not regret
   To drop behind.
- "The Superseded", st. 1

That high compassion which can overbear
Reluctance for pure lovingkindness’ sake.
- "A Broken Appointment", st. 1

Whence comes Solace?—Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Nor from heeding Time’s monitions;
   But in cleaving to the Dream,
   And in gazing at the gleam
   Whereby gray things golden seem.
- "On a Fine Morning", st. 1

Dullest of dull-hued Days!
- "A Commonplace Day", st. 3

No man can change the common lot to rare.
- To an Unborn Pauper Child", st. 5

I saw a dead man’s finer part
Shining within each faithful heart
Of those bereft. Then said I: 'This must be
His immortality.'
- "Immortality", st. 1

Thou should’st have learnt that Not to Mend
For Me could mean but Not to Know.
- "God-forgotten", st. 11

It surely is far sweeter and more wise
To water love, than toil to leave anon
A name whose glory-gleam will but advise
Invidious minds to quench it with their own.
- "Her Reproach", st. 3

A shaded lamp and a waving blind,
And the beat of a clock from a distant floor:
On this scene enter—winged, horned, and spined—
A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore;
While ’mid my page there idly stands
A sleepy fly, that rubs its hands...
- "An August Midnight", st. 1

And feign like truth, for one mad day,
That Earth is Paradise?
- "To Life", st. 3

When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have play in each proud land,
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?
- "Departure", ll. 11–4

The world-imprinting power of perished Rome.
- "In the Old Theatre, Fiesole", st. 3 (April 1887)
  - The power, the pride, the reach of perished Rome. (ed. 1919)

Time’s central city, Rome.
- "Rome", st. 1 (April 1887)

My ardours for emprize nigh lost
Since Life has bared its bones to me,
I shrink to seek a modern coast
Whose riper times have yet to be;
Where the new regions claim them free
From that long drip of human tears
Which peoples old in tragedy
Have left upon the centuried years.
- "On an Invitation to the United States", st. 1

Con the dead page as ’twere live love: press on!
Cold wisdom’s words will ease thy track for thee.
- "Her Reproach", st. 1 (1867)

O memory, where is now my youth,
Who used to say that life was truth?
- "Memory and I", st. 1

The Dynasts (1904–1908)

It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance.
- Pt. I, forescene, Shade of the Earth & Spirit of the Years

Why doth IT so and so, and ever so,
This viewless,
voiceless Turner of the Wheel?
- Pt. I, forescene, Spirit of the Pities

What of the Immanent Will and its designs?
It works unconsciously as heretofore,
External artistries in circumstance.
- Pt. I, forescene

A local thing called Christianity.
- Pt. I, sc. vi, Spirit of the Years

Aggressive Fancy working spells
Upon a mind o’erwrought.
- Pt. I, sc. vi, Napoleon

Ere systemed suns were globed and lit
The slaughters of the race were writ.
- Pt. II, sc. v, Semichorus I

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
- Pt. II, sc. v, Spirit Sinister

The victors and the vanquished then the storm it tossed and tore,
As hard they strove, those worn-out men, upon that surly shore;
Dead Nelson and his half-dead crew, his foes from near and far,
Were rolled together on the deep that night at Trafalgar.
- Pt. V, sc. vii (Song, st. 3)

Time's Laughingstocks (1909)

Here by the baring bough
   Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
   Springtime deceives,—
I, an old woman now,
   Raking up leaves.
- "Autumn in King's Hintock Park" (1901), lines 1-6, [10]

   Yes; quaint and curious war is!
   You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
   Or help to half-a-crown.
- Lines 17-20 from "The Man He Killed" (1902)

Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
- "Let Me Enjoy", [11]

Satires of Circumstance (1914)

When I set out for Lyonnesse,
   A hundred miles away,
   The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
   A hundred miles away.
- "When I Set out for Lyonnesse", ll. 1-4 [12]
  - Dated (1870) in Collected Poems (1932)

We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone.
- "The Ghost of the Past", ll. 1-4 [13]

   In a solitude of the sea
   Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
   Steel chambers, late the pyres
   Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.
   Over the mirrors meant
   To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
- "The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic)", ll. 1-9 (1912) [14]

The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything.
- "The Convergence of the Twain", l. 18

   And as the smart ship grew
   In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
   Alien they seemed to be;
   No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,
   Or sign that they were bent
   By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,
   Till the Spinner of the Years
   Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
- "The Convergence of the Twain", ll. 22-33

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone
Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
- "The Going", ll. 1-6 (1912)

I seem but a dead man held on end
To sink down soon.... O you could not know
That such swift fleeing
No soul foreseeing —
Not even I — would undo me so!
- "The Going", ll. 38-42 [15]

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.
- "The Voice", ll. 1-4 (1912) [16]

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgement Day.
- "Channel Firing", ll. 1-4 (1914) [17]

It's gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be.
- "Channel Firing", ll. 10-12

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
- "Channel Firing", ll. 33-36

In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy,
And the roof-lamp's oily flame
Played down on his listless form and face,
Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going,
Or whence he came.
- "Midnight on the Great Western", from Moments of Vision (1917)

Moments of Vision (1917)

What of the faith and fire within us
   Men who march away
   Ere the barn-cocks say
   Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence no tears can win us;
What of the faith and fire within us
   Men who march away!
- "Men Who March Away", ll. 1-7 (1914) [18]

Only a man harrowing clods
   In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
   Half asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame
   From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
   Though Dynasties pass.
Yonder a maid and her wight
   Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
   Ere their story die.
- "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", ll. 1-12 (1915) [19]
  - The title is derived from Jeremiah 51:20: "Thou art my battle ax and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations."

I am the family face;
   Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
   Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
   Over oblivion.
- "Heredity", ll. 1-6 [20]

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance—that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die.
- "Heredity", ll. 7-12

Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
- "During Wind and Rain", ll. 27-28 [21]
  - Variant: 'chiselled' for 'carved'

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?
- "Afterwards", ll. 1-4 [22]

Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)

The bower we shrined to Tennyson,
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon
Sagged seats, the creeper-nails are rust,
The spider is sole denizen;
Even she who read those rhymes is dust,
Gentlemen!
- "An Ancient To Ancients"

A radiant stranger, who saw not me.
I queried, "Get out to her do I dare?"
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
And the wheels moved on.
O could it but be
That I had alighted there!
- "Faintheart in a Railway Train"

This is the weather the cuckoo likes,
   And so do I;
When showers betumble the chestnut spikes,
   And nestlings fly;
And the little brown nightingale bills his best,
And they sit outside at "The Traveller's Rest",
And maids come forth sprig-muslin drest,
And citizens dream of the south and west,
   And so do I.
- "Weathers", ll.1-9

This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I.
- "Weathers", ll. 10-11 [23]

And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.
- "Weathers", ll. 15-18

Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)

A star looks down at me,
And says: "Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do,—
Mean to do?"
- "Waiting Both", ll. 1-5 [24]

Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)

'Peace upon earth!' was said. We sing it
And pay a million priests to bring it.
After two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.
- "Christmas: 1924" [25]

Well, World, you have kept faith with me,
Kept faith with me;
Upon the whole you have proved to be
Much as you said you were.
- "He Never Expected Much" [26]

Since as a child I used to lie
Upon the leaze and watch the sky,
Never, I own, expected I
That life would all be fair.
- "He Never Expected Much", ll. 5-8

Letters and conversations

]]

People call me a pessimist; and if it is pessimism to think, with Sophocles, that "not to have been born is best," then I do not reject the designation. I never could understand why the word "pessimism" should be such a red rag to many worthy people; and I believe, indeed, that a good deal of the robustious, swaggering optimism of recent literature is at bottom cowardly and insincere. I do not see that we are likely to improve the world by asseverating, however loudly, that black is white, or at least that black is but a necessary contrast and foil, without which white would be white no longer. That is mere juggling with a metaphor. But my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs, and that Ahriman is winning all along the line. On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist. What are my books but one plea against "man's inhumanity to man" — to woman — and to the lower animals? [...] Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it much worse than it need be. When we have got rid of a thousand remediable ills, it will be time enough to determine whether the ill that is irremediable outweighs the good.
- February 1901 conversation with William Archer, Real Conversations (1904), pp. 46-47 [27]

Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called the 'Golden Rule' from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not quite perceive it. While man was deemed to be a creation apart from all other creations, a secondary or tertiary morality was considered good enough to practise towards the 'inferior' races; but no person who reasons nowadays can escape the trying conclusion that this is not maintainable. And though we may not at present see how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in it entirety, I recognise that the League is grappling with the question.
- Letter to the Humanitarian League (1910)

Posthumous publications

To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.
- Statement (5 August 1888), as quoted in The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1928 (1962) by Florence Emily Hardy

If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
- Diary entry (18 August 1908), quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), by Florence Emily Hardy, ch. 10, p. 133

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
- Quoted in The Later Years of Thomas Hardy (1930), by Florence Emily Hardy, ch. 17, p. 212

Misattributed

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.
- This quote can be traced to two authors, in books published within the same year:
  1) Rev. Edward John Hardy, known as E.J. Hardy (1849-1920), How to Be Happy Though Civil: A Book on Manners (New York, Scribners, 1909), ch. VI: A Christian Gentleman;
  
  2) John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, Peace and Happiness (Macmillan, 1909), ch. XV: Religion

Quotes about Hardy

Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), p. 143

The God of Meredith is impersonal; but he is often more healthy and kindly than any of the persons. That of Thomas Hardy is almost made personal by the intense feeling that he is poisonous. Nature is always coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature (1913), pp. 143-144

I was twelve when I read my first Hardy. It was Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I can remember the thrill of the whole new world of emotion and experience it opened up to me. I went day by day to the public library to read other Hardys till I got stuck half-way through Jude the Obscure. That was the end of Hardy for me at that time.
- William Haley (writing under the pseudonym Oliver Edwards), 'Unlicensed Reading', The Times (3 May 1957), p. 15

Tess has become a national icon, like Heathcliff, a melodramatic archetype, regarded as common cultural property, who has taken on a life independent of the original novel. The fact that a production is unfaithful to Hardy is almost irrelevant.
Hardy saw the lives of the humblest labourers as a Greek tragedy. His novels are remorseless litanies of misery and despair. I suspect that townies who romanticise rural life will be doomed to spend aeons in purgatory as the wretched characters in his novels to punish their sentimentality.
- Paul Hoggart, 'Scenic route to literature', The Times supplement Vision (28 March 1998), p. 2

But oh yes, dear Louis, she [Tess] is vile. The pretence of 'sexuality' is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style.
- Henry James, Letter to R.L. Stevenson, 17 February 1893, in Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R.G. Cox (1995)

(If you had to name a favorite novelist, who would it be?) Thomas Hardy. Ever since I first read him, in high school, I’ve felt a kinship with his characters, his sense of place, his pitiless vision of humanity. I continue to reread him as often as I can. The architecture of his novels is magnificent, and the way his characters move through time and space is remarkably controlled. The world he creates is absolutely specific, as is the psychological terrain. In spite of the great scope of his work, its breadth and complexity, the prose is clean, straightforward, economical. No scene, no detail, no sentence is wasted.
- Jhumpa Lahiri Interview (2013)

One of the most dramatic of novelists—except on the rare occasions when he is melodramatic—Mr Hardy has endued with life and colour all that a student of antiquities, history, architecture, and folk-lore could discover relating to his native county; and with wonderful accuracy, lightness, and charm he has revealed the poetry with which the ways of the woodman and the farmer, the neatherd, the shepherd, and other rural figures, are still surrounded.
- Edward Wright, "The Novels of Thomas Hardy". The Quarterly Review 199: 499–523., April 1904, quote on pp. 507–508

External links

Thomas Hardy at Wikiquote's sister projects:
	Article at Wikipedia
	Media from Commons
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks
	Database entry #Q132805 on Wikidata

Works by Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg