Quote

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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Thomas Hardy
Age: 87 †
Born: 1840
Born: June 2
Died: 1928
Died: January 28
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Dorchester
Dorset
Makes
Line
Neediness
Ends
Perhaps
Cramps
Littles
Position
Happiest
Little
Lines
Positions
Enough
Feeling
Scale
Natural
Scales
Social
Stress
Threadbare
Feelings
Begin
Cramp

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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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?
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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
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- the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man.
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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!
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The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.
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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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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.
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Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed. Teach me to die.
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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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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.
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So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.
Thomas Hardy
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He wished she knew his impressions but he would as soon have thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent.
Thomas Hardy
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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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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Thomas Hardy
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It was still early, and the sun's lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.
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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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.
Thomas Hardy
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Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
Thomas Hardy