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There were black crescents under her eyes. They say rescue fantasies are a feminine thing. If that is true, then there is no one more feminine than my father: his mind told him to leave right then. To recuperate from her. Instead, he hugged her as hard as he could and heard himself ask if she would come to live with him.
She looked at him with her slow, faraway gaze. I can actually see her dipping him in some..

In lume se petrec multe, insa cum nu putem dori ca ele sa nu se intample si nici ca toate sa dăinuie intr-o pașnica încremenire, nu avem nici dreptul sa osandim patimile care le misca; caci fara vina si patima, nu s-ar mai urni nimic.

Devenise căsătoria, ceruta si statornicita de Dumnezeu, a omului cu divinitatea, infaptuita pe acea parte a trupului care părea sa constituie punctul de convergenta al ființei sale si pe care se făcea orice jurământ trupesc. Erau bărbați care purtau numele Domnului pe membrul lor genitor sau îl scriau pe el înainte de a poseda o femeie. Legământul de credință cu Dumnezeu avea un caracter sexual..

Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself immensely. Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.

But at midnight when no one speaks or gallops, and the thorn tree is perfectly still, it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions— what? and why?
The church clock, however, strikes twelve.

After all, it was none of her fault. But the thought saddened him. It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Any excuse, though, serves a stupid woman. He told her his head ached.

No matter. There are things that can’t be said. Let’s shake it off. Let’s dry ourselves, and take up the first thing that comes handy…

...as if language were wine upon his lips [...] But language is wine upon his lips.

'But if I met him, what should I wear?' --and then, taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play upon other details of men's meeting with women which have never got into print.

Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done--for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: 'Let me' very shyly; indeed, he was rather clumsy about it.

'How could I think of marriage!' she said to herself bitterly, as she fastened the gate with a piece of wire. [...] and pushing her work-box away, she drew the blotting-paper towards her, and read Mr. Floyd's letter again, and her breast went up and down when she came to the word 'love', but not so fast this time, for she saw Johnny chasing the geese, and knew that it was impossible for her to marry anyone-

Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love. 

Looking at her silently for a long time; "She is a dear dear Tess," he thought to himself, as one deciding on the true construction of a difficult passage. "Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is.

“Why do you cry, dearest?

"I can't tell—quite!—I am so glad to think—of being yours, and making you happy!

"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my Tessy!

"I mean—I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I said I would die unmarried!

But, if you love me you would like me to be your husband?

"Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!”

It was for herself that he loved Tess;her soul,her heart,her substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for her simple formal faith-professions.Her unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable to him.He held that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends

Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?he asked. 

Oh, 'tis only—about my own self, she said, with a frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. Just a sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!

The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain. She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the thought of the world's concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought.

You ought to have been more careful if you didn't mean to get him to make you his wife!

O mother, my mother! cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me?

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and provide for them. Her mother's intelligence was that of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own long family of waiters on Providence. 

“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 stubbard-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." 

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, 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. 

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They were all cheerful, and many of them merry.

But this is all midsummer madness.

Her thoughts were all secret. Her heart was locked and bolted.

One by one, her illusions had departed.

To love a character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a series of allowances. To begin to understand is to being to sympathize.

Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human.

‘If he be Mr Hyde,’ he had thought, ‘I shall be Mr Seek.’

There was far too much anger in her, far too much hatred. Did she recognize this in Alex from the first second? That he would awaken in her again and again the same primitive anger, the same hidden infantile desires, despite the fact that he will love her with all his being, until the last day of his life?

The foretaste of their reunion and the dreams of their future together filled her with vitality, even in the darkest moments. Although most of the time she didn't know where he was, so discreet they had to be, she felt his presence with her, as if he were part of her being, as if they were one body, one mind. Was that why he had come to hate her so much in the end, because he hated himself?

Gandul ca nu te voi mai vedea niciodata ma impietreste. […] Viata merge inainte si nu poti s-o intelegi decat privind inapoi. E atat de infricosator, nu stiu cum voi putea accepta situatia asta.