O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!
— Thomas Hardy
Reckoning Tess Of The D Urbervilles quotations
While there's life, there is hope.
A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.
It was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity
Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.
Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.
Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?
This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?
Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?
Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks.
My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.
Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a novel that I have read over and over and over again. Tess is a pure child who has an inner glow none of the others in the book possess. They reject her because she is different, and they try in every possible manner to destroy her, because they are jealous. It is an extraordinary love story.
