Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

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.

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.

don’t I know it

Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech.

In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal.

“My life is a burden without you,” he exclaimed, in a low voice. “I want you—I want you to let me say I love you again and again!”

sir… SIR…. calm down….

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. 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. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

Her culpability lay in her making no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into consequences. She could show others the steep and thorny way, but “reck’d not her own rede.”

And Troy’s deformities lay deep down from a woman’s vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.

The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she had o...

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.