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A novel is an impression, not an argument and there the matter must rest.

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
Impression
Argument
Novel
Rest
Reading
Matter
Must

More quotes by Thomas Hardy

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My wicked heart will ramble on in spite of myself. (Arabella)
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The sudden disappointment of a hope leaves a scar which the ultimate fulfillment of that hope never entirely removes.
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To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.
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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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If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.
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There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration.
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We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more.
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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Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
Thomas Hardy
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Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
Thomas Hardy
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Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.
Thomas Hardy
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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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Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Thomas Hardy
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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
Thomas Hardy
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The defective can be more than the entire.
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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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It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.
Thomas Hardy
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All romances end at marriage.
Thomas Hardy
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If an offense come out of the truth, better is it that the offense come than that the truth be concealed.
Thomas Hardy
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Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one
Thomas Hardy