857 Quotes by Thomas Hardy

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.

He had, he verily believed, overcome all tendency to fly to liquor - which, indeed, he had never done from taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of the mind.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thingAlive enough to have strength to die;

The landlord of the lodging, who had heard that they were a queer couple, had doubted if they were married at all, especially as he had seen Arabella kiss Jude one evening when she had taken a little cordial; and he was about to give them notice to quit, till by chance overhearing her one night haranguing Jude in rattling terms, and ultimately flinging a shoe at his head, he recognized the note of ordinary wedlock; and concluding that they must be respectable, said no more.

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.

Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.

I have been looking at the marriage service in the Prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a giver-away should be required at all. According to the ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his own will and pleasure; but I don’t choose him. Somebody gives me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other domestic animal.

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable ; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it.

I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one has done so ignorantly ! I daresay it happens to lots of women; only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!