Far From the Madding Crowd Quotes

“Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don't yet know my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you. Don't any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I'm a woman I don't understand the difference between bad goings-on and good."   (All.)”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“shall be up before you are awake; I shall be afield before you are up; and I shall have breakfasted before you are afield. In short, I shall astonish you all."   (All.)”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon that its summit indistinctly commanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless shade—the sounds from which suggested that what it concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or less coating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differing natures—one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them like a soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees on the right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of a cathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to the tenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more.   The”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do 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.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“I shall do one thing in this life – one thing certain – that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“December morning—sunny and exceedingly mild—might have regarded Gabriel”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman's part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba's position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“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.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel's.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“love, life and everything human seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated universe'. (p.309)”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The only superiority in women that is tolerable to the rival sex is, as a rule, that of the unconscious kind; but a superiority which recognizes itself may sometimes please by suggesting possibilities of capture to the subordinated man. This”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Perhaps in no minor point does a woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false – except indeed in that of being utterly skeptical on strictures that she knows to be true.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“He is as good as anybody in this parish! He is very particular, too, about going to church-yes, he is!'

'I am afeard nobody ever saw him there. I never did, certainly.'

'The reason of that is,' she said eagerly, 'that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.'

This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Human shapes, interferences, troubles, and joys were all as if they were not, and there seemed to be on the shaded hemisphere of the globe no sentient being save himself; he could fancy them all gone round to the sunny side.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“The disturbance was as the first floating weed to Columbus—the contemptibly little suggesting possibilities of the infinitely great.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“You are nothing to me—nothing," said Troy, heartlessly. "A ceremony before a priest doesn't make a marriage. I am not morally yours.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“He had a quick comprehension and considerable force of character; but, being without the power to combine them, the comprehension became engaged with trivialities whilst waiting for the will to direct it, and the force wasted itself in useless grooves through unheeding the comprehension.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“...reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease...”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones-- dancing, leaping, striding, and mingling in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined snakes of green, rising and falling, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. From every part of the tumbling sky came a shout. ... Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand-- a sensation new and thrilling. But love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling beside the spectacle of an infuriated universe.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“You were nothing to me once, and I was contented; you are now nothing to me again, and how different the second nothing is from the first! Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down!”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“By making inquiries he found that the girl's name was Bathsheba Everdene, and that the cow would go dry in about seven days. He dreaded the eighth day.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit, spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that of exorbitant profit, bodily or materially, is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere), every morning Oak's feelings were as sensitive as the money-market in calculations upon his chances.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Dazzled by brass and scarlet - O, Bathsheba - this is a woman's folly indeed!”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“There are considerations even before my consideration for you; reparations to be made-ties you know nothing of. If you repent of marrying, so do I.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“This supreme instance of Troy's goodness fell upon Gabriel's ears like the thirteenth stroke of a crazy clock.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd