The Return of the Native Quotes

“Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.”
― Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native

“She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favors here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Once let a maiden admit the possibility of her being stricken with love for some one at a certain hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“To sorrow I bade good morrow, And thought to leave her far away behind; But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly; She is so constant to me, and so kind.

I would deceive her, And so leave her, But ah! she is so constant and so kind”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! ...I do not deserve my lot! ...O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to heaven at all!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free from that quality of selfishness which is frequently the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes it's only one!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“We have missed because we tried to miss, I suppose.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in "Athalie"; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent divinity to this face, already beautiful.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighboring yeomen, the listener said, "Ah, Clym Yeobright: what is he doing now?' When the instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity , good or bad. The devout home is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it...So the subject recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better for him, if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the better for a narrative”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“but though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle's watch had numbered many followers in years gone by, but since he had grown older faiths were shaken. Thus, the mummers having gathered here from scattered points, each came with his own tenets on early and late; and they waited a little longer as a compromise.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Edgon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europaeus--which will act as a sort of hairbrush--she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“You are a chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall hate you!”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist that perishable tissue has to think.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

“It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.”
― Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native