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The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

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
Ugliness
Character
Impulse
Done
Aim
Things
Lays
Achievement
Willed
Among
Impulses
Beauty
Aims
History
Achievements

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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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Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.
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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.
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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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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
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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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Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
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They spoke very little of their mutual feeling pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.
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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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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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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
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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.
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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I shall do one thing in this life-one thing certain-this is, love you, and long of you, and keep wanting you till I die.
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A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy