The Mayor of Casterbridge Quotes

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Some folks want their luck buttered.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends...”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor Of Casterbridge

“But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't have what I need!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly...Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer; while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor Of Casterbridge

“The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity—even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

“And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum--which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing--stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Mayor Of Casterbridge