Thomas Hardy Zitate

seite 4

„Wenn Frauen geheim sind, sind sie tatsächlich geheim. Und nicht selten werden sie erst mit dem Aufkommen eines zweiten Liebhabers geheim.“

„Ich finde, wenn Kinder geboren werden, die man nicht haben will, dann sollten sie gleich tot gemacht werden, ehe sie Seelen kriegen, und man sollte sie gar nicht groß werden und herum laufen lassen!“

„Aber manche Frauen brauchen nur die Herausforderung, damit sie ihr gewachsen sind.“

„Der Arzt sagte, solche Kinder kämen jetzt manchmal vor – Kinder, wie sie die vorige Generation nicht gekannt habe -, das Ergebnis neuer Anschauungen vom Leben. Es ist, als sähen diese Kinder alle seine Schrecknisse, ehe sie alt genug sind, die nötige Widerstandskraft dagegen aufzubringen. Er sagt, es wäre der Anfang des kommenden allgemeinen Wunsches, nicht zu leben.“

„Für eine Frau ist es schwierig, ihre Gefühle in einer Sprache zu definieren, die hauptsächlich von Männern gemacht wird, um ihre auszudrücken.“

„… sie bewegte sich in einer mentalen Wolke vielfarbiger Idealitäten, die alle finsteren Eventualitäten durch ihre Helligkeit in den Schatten stellte.“

„All das bedeutet schwere Herbstarbeit für ihn und seine Hände.“

„Ihre Zuneigung zu ihm war jetzt der Atem und das Leben von Tesss Wesen; es umhüllte sie wie eine Photosphäre, strahlte sie in die Vergesslichkeit ihrer vergangenen Sorgen aus und hielt die düsteren Gespenster zurück, die bei ihren Versuchen, sie zu berühren, fortbestehen würden - Zweifel, Angst, Launenhaftigkeit, Besorgnis, Scham. Sie wusste, dass sie wie Wölfe direkt vor dem eigrenzenden Licht warteten, aber sie hatte lange Zaubermacht, um sie dort in hungriger Unterwerfung zu halten.“

“"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.”

“For of all the miseries attaching to miserable love, the worst is the misery of thinking that the passion which is the cause of them all may cease.”

“So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.”

“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!”

“[Of a wedding:] And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.”

“My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”

“What of the Immanent Will and Its designs?
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance.”

“The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.”

“All that blooth means heavy autumn work for him and his hands.”

“And meadow rivulets overflow,
And drops on gate bars hang in a row,
And rooks in families homeward go,
And so do I.”

“The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time—to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.”

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”

“Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.”

“But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world.”

“With all, the beautiful things of the earth become more dear as they elude pursuit; but with some natures utter elusion is the one special event which will make a passing love permanent for ever.”

“You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!”

“A star looks down at me,
And says: "Here I and you
Stand each in our degree:
What do you mean to do,—
Mean to do?"”

“In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.”

“When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness.”

“It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.”

“A local cult, called Christianity.”

“The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red. 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.”

“They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined — just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew —
Fresh from his Wessex home —
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.”

“The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not.”

“William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough,
Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's,
And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!”

“I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.”

“Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle.”

“Here by the baring bough
Raking up leaves,
Often I ponder how
Springtime deceives,—
I, an old woman now,
Raking up leaves.”

“Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!”