Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.
If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do.
I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am. I doubt if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following inclination...
Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
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 am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.
Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.
Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make...
And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me, and think, Poor girl! believing they do great justice to my memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it was my single opp...
Fear is the mother of foresight.
Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
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.
It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called-- were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should...
...there was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.
I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.
The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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.