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It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

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
Accepting
Husbands
Wife
Wives
Possible
Appears
Women
Possession
Without
Accept
Take
Husband
Men
Ordinary
Marriage

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A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.
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To dance with a man is to concentrate a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance, to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
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War makes rattling good history.
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I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.
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If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.
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Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.
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You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
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Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the betrayed as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
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It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing.
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You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.
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Pessimism is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child's play.
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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.
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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.
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Yes quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you'd treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown.
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
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All romances end at marriage.
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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.
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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.
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She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.
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