Dialect words - those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

— Thomas Hardy

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

— Thomas Hardy

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"" Yes."" All like ours?"" I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stub bard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."" Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"" A blighted one.

— Thomas Hardy

Done because we are too many.

— Thomas Hardy

Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as you yourself to me myself - poor me!

— Thomas Hardy

Don't take on about her, Gabriel. What difference does it make whose sweetheart she is, since she can't be yours?'' That's the very thing I say to myself,' said Gabriel.

— Thomas Hardy

Don't that make your bosom plum?

— Thomas Hardy

Eustachian Bye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

— Thomas Hardy

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.

— Thomas Hardy

Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterward recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.

— Thomas Hardy