Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in Dorchester, a place whose presence would remain constant across the full span of his life. A citizen of the United Kingdom, Hardy wrote in English and pursued an education that took him through King's College London and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, a training in built form and spatial logic that preceded his commitment to fiction and poetry. He worked within the naturalism movement, a literary orientation that shaped his approach to character and circumstance throughout his career.
Hardy's output as a novelist was substantial, and three works stand as particularly notable: Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, each tracing the lives of characters caught within forces larger than their individual will. Alongside his novels, Hardy worked as a poet and a screenwriter, carrying multiple vocations through a long writing life. His standing in English letters was formally recognized through his appointment as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and through his receipt of the Order of Merit.
Hardy died on 11 January 1928 in Dorchester, the same place where he had been born nearly eighty-eight years before.
Quotes by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy's insights on:
Over the mirrors meant / To glass the opulent / The sea-worm crawls—grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.
And at home by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be--and whenever I look up, there will be you.
Clouds spout upon her / Their waters amain / In ruthless disdain, – / Her who but lately / Had shivered with pain / As at touch of dishonour / If there had lit on her / So coldly, so straightly / Such arrows of rain
Purism, whether in grammar or in vocabulary, almost always means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before language.
This scene, like my own life,' I said, 'is one / Where many glooms abide; / Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun-- / Lightless on every side.
The fundamental error of their matrimonial union; that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling.
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.
I can recall no word / Of anything he did; / For me he is a man who died and was interred / To leave a pyramid.