Far From the Madding Crowd Quotes

“Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes because men and women associate not in their labors but in their pleasures merely.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Separation…though effectual with people of certain humors, is apt to idealize the removed object with others; notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be, flows deep and long.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“…the more emphatic the renunciation, the less absolute its character.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years?”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Boldwood, whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Gabriel's malignant star was assuredly setting fast.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It 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, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn—as I do now!”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“away from courting me—” Gabriel expanded. “I’m sorry to have made you run so fast, my dear,” he said, with a grateful sense of favours”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd

“He descended and came to a small basin of sea enclosed by the cliffs. Troy's nature freshened within him; he thought he would rest and bathe here before going farther. He undressed and plunged in. Inside the cove the water was uninteresting to a swimmer, being smooth as a pond, and to get a little of the ocean swell, Troy presently swam between the two projecting spurs of rock which formed the pillars of Hercules to this miniature Mediterranean. Unfortunately for Troy a current unknown to him existed outside, which, unimportant to craft of any burden, was awkward for a swimmer who might be taken in it unawares. Troy found himself carried to the left and then round in a swoop out to sea.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Oak was just thinking that whatever he
himself might have suffered from Bathsheba's marriage, here was a
man who had suffered more, when Boldwood spoke in a changed
voice—that of one who yearned to make a confidence and relieve his
heart by an outpouring.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd," as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom. The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: 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, by the influence of a wife and family.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Indeed, he seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line—less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“in the month-by-month process of editorial criticism and censorship, Hardy never lost his fierce contempt for all forms of ‘tampering with natural truth”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts;”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“How did this remarkable reappearance effect itself when he was supposed by many to be at the bottom of the sea?”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and fictitious faith is better than no faith at all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“The most vigorous expression of a resolution does not always coincide with the greatest vigour of the resolution itself.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“her presence had not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to exercise it.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“Henery Fray was the first to follow. Then Gabriel arose and went off with Jan Coggan, who had offered him a lodging. A few minutes later, when the remaining ones were on their legs and about to depart, Fray came back again in a hurry. Flourishing his finger ominously he threw a gaze teeming with tidings just where his eye alighted by accident, which happened to be in Joseph Poorgrass's face.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“This good-fellowship—camaraderie—usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd