Quote

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.

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
Terms
Fragments
Men
Marriage
Concentrate
Fire
Royal
Skipping
Alone
Regulation
Fragment
Term
Pass
Courtship
Hour
Tread
Hours
Road
Reserved
Upon
Dance
Acquaintance
Without

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This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
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Where we are would be Paradise to me, if you would only make it so.
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Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
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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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Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.
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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
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Always wanting another man than your own.
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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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Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?
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I am the family face flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.
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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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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
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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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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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