Quote

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.

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
Last
Birds
Upon
Fell
Eye
Sing
Beautiful
Bird
Hisses
Today
Sweet
Tess
Since
Serpent
Eyes
Learnt
Lasts
Terribly

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And yet to every bad there is a worse.
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Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.
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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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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on.
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
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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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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.
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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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Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
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Women accept their destiny more readily than men.
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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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We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.
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It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.
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All romances end at marriage.
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That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.
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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
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Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?
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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.
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