The Woodlanders Quotes

“He Looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him the sweet atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“...Nameless, unknown to me as you were, I couldn't forget your voice!'
'For how long?'
'O - ever so long. Days and days.'
'Days and days! Only days and days? O, the heart of a man! Days and days!'
'But, my dear madam, I had not known you more than a day or two. It was not a full-blown love - it was the merest bud - red, fresh, vivid, but small. It was a colossal passion in embryo. It never returned.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“For the love of men like Fitzpiers is unquestionably of such quality as to bear division and transference. He had indeed once declared, though not to her, that on one occasion he had noticed himself to be possessed by five distinct infatuations at the same time. If this were true, his differed from the highest affection as the lower orders of the animal world differ from advanced organisms, partition causing not death but a multiplied existence.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude continuously beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its mobile power ; but in the still water of privacy every feeling and sentiment unfolds in visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a printed word by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed....the taper was interrupted..and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“She showed that oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps more frequent in women of darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond’s was; women who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak to them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“She saw nothing of Winterborne during he days of her recovery: and perhaps on that account her fancy wove about him a more romantic tissue than it could have done if he had stood before her with all the specks and flaws inseparable from concrete humanity”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as clearly as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Ah, fool," he went on to himself, "to clip your own wings when you were free to soar! . . . But I could not rest till I had done it. Why do I never recognise an opportunity till I have missed it, nor the good or ill of a step till it is irrevocable? . . . I fell in love!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Time enough to cry when you know 'tis a crying matter; 'tis bad to meet troubles half-way.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Why - what the name - began her father. I thought you went out to get the parsley!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The secret of happiness lay in limiting the aspirations.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator.
"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the world!" said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in the above strain.
Marty shook her head. "In all our out-door days and years together, ma'am," she replied, "the one thing he never spoke of to me was love; nor I to him."
"Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew—not even my father, though he came nearest knowing—the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers themselves.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“...think it with all your heart," said he. "It is a pleasant thought, and costs nothing.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life—if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere—and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“It was an endless monologue, like that we sometimes hear from inanimate nature in deep secret places where water flows, or where ivy leaves flap against stones; but by degrees she was convinced that the voice was Winterborne's.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The evening came at last; the sun, when its chin was on the earth, found an opening through which to pierce the shade, and stretched irradiated gauzes across the damp atmosphere, making the wet trunks shine, and throwing splotches of such ruddiness on the leaves beneath the beech that they were turned to gory hues.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“It was snowing with a fine-flaked desultoriness just sufficient to make the woodland grey, without ever achieving whiteness.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“He looked and smelt like Autumn's very brother, his face being sunburnt to wheat-colour, his eyes blue as corn-flowers, his sleeves and leggings dyed with fruit-stains, his hands clammy with the sweet juice of apples, his hat sprinkled with pips, and everywhere about him that atmosphere of cider which at its first return each season has such an indescribable fascination for those who have been born and bred among the orchards.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“She rose when the sparrows began to walk out of the roof-holes, sat on the floor of her room in the dim light, and by-and-by peeped out behind the window-curtains. It was even now day out-of-doors, though the tones of morning were feeble and wan, and it was long before the sun would be perceptible in this overshadowed vale. Not a sound came from any of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“In their gestures and faces there were anxieties, affection, agony of heart - all for a man who had wronged them - had never really behaved towards either of them anyhow but selfishly.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“He [Mr. Melbury] knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be done.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“Matrimonial ambition is such an honourable thing.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

“The secret of happiness lay in limiting the aspirations . . .”
― Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders