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“My name is Gabriel Oak.” “And mine isn’t. You seem fond of yours in speaking it so decisively, Gabriel Oak.”
Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness.
Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.
I hate to be thought men’s property in that way, though possibly I shall be had some day.
“I shall do one thing in this life—one thing certain—that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.
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; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides.
There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s.
“I don’t see why a maid should take a husband when she’s bold enough to fight her own battles, and don’t want a home;
people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.
Women are never tired of bewailing man’s fickleness in love, but they only seem to snub his constancy.
When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
Loving is misery for women always.
It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
The real sin, ma’am in my mind, lies in thinking of ever wedding wi’ a man you don’t love honest and true.”
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.
Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all) when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other’s character, and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality.
