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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.

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

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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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War makes good history but peace is poor reading.
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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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The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
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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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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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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.
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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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Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.
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Done because we are too many.
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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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There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.
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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
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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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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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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.
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All romances end at marriage.
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Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
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