Far From the Madding Crowd Quotes

“He can blow the flute very well-that 'a can,' said a young married man, who having no individuality worth mentioning was known as 'Susan Tall's husband.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the greatest freedom to Liddy, but she only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“What's right week days is right Sundays,”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this dismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is seldom that a person with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of his life being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as a more hopeful life than that of others who may actually resemble him in every particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundreds of times, that he could not envy other people their condition, because the possession of that condition would have necessitated a different personality, when he desired no other than his own. He had not minded the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his life, the meteor-like uncertainty of all that related to him, because these appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would have been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in the nature of things that matters would right themselves at some proper date and wind up well. This very morning the illusion completed its disappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Your next world is your next world, and not to be squandered offhand.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Why did Troy not leave my treasure alone?”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“He resolved never again, by look or by sign, to interrupt the steady flow of this man's life.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which had only a few days to last—the morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“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 ears like the thirteenth stroke of crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Bathsheba, though she had too much understanding to be entirely governed by her womanliness, had too much womanliness to use her understanding to the best advantage.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behaviour. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Our moods meet in the wrong places.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“We discern a grand force in the lover which he lacks while a free man, but there is a breadth of vision in the free man which in the lover we vainly seek.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Get away, Maryann, or go on with your scrubbing, or do something! You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me!"
"Ay, mistress—so I did. But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Es muy difícil para una mujer expresar sus sentimientos en un lenguaje que, principalmente, sirve para que los hombres expresen los suyos.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“as without law there is no sin, without eyes there is no indecorum;”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“A man who has spent his primal strength in journeying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversing his course.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“That's a handsome maid," he said to Oak. "But she has her faults," said Gabriel. "True, farmer." "And the greatest of them is—well, what it is always." "Beating people down? ay, 'tis so." "O no." "What, then?" Gabriel, perhaps a little piqued by the comely traveller's indifference, glanced back to where he had witnessed her performance over the hedge, and said, "Vanity.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice,”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction—every kind of evidence in the logician's list—have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite in isolation. Farmer”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Boldwood looked at her—not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train—as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements—comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to consider.   He”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

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

“The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“It was a night when sorrow may come to the brightest without causing any great sense of incongruity: when, with impressible persons, love becomes solicitousness, hope sinks to misgiving, and faith to hope: when the exercise of memory does not stir feelings of regret at opportunities for ambition that have been passed by, and anticipation does not prompt to enterprise.   The”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“In about the time a person unaccustomed to bodily labour would have decided upon which side to lie, Farmer Oak was asleep.   The”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Love is a possible strength in an actual weakness. Marriage”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd