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If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables?

Thomas Hardy

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Thomas Hardy
Age: 87 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1928
Died: January 28
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Dorset
True
Tellers
Stories
Parables
Good
Troubled
Decency
Morals
Invent
Moral
Story

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.
Thomas Hardy
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Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.
Thomas Hardy
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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
Thomas Hardy
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And yet to every bad there is a worse.
Thomas Hardy
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To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
Thomas Hardy
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
Thomas Hardy
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She was of the stuff of which great men's mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises.
Thomas Hardy
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My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
Thomas Hardy
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That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.
Thomas Hardy
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
Thomas Hardy
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In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving
Thomas Hardy
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
Thomas Hardy
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Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thomas Hardy
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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 license to receive it.
Thomas Hardy
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Always wanting another man than your own.
Thomas Hardy
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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.
Thomas Hardy
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
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Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Thomas Hardy