Tess of the D'Urbervilles

By Thomas Hardy

QUOTATION: That cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), British novelist, poet. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. 13 (1891).

QUOTATION: [T]hat moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.
ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), British novelist, poet. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. 13 (1891).

QUOTATION: Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.
ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), British novelist, poet. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. XI (1892).

QUOTATION: The season developed and matured. Another year’s installment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), British novelist, poet. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. XX (1892).

QUOTATION: All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under their hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s holy plan.”
ATTRIBUTION: Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), British novelist, poet. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ch. III (1891).

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