Thomas Hardy Zitate

seite 5

„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.“

“But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that.”

“To find beauty in ugliness is the province of the poet.”

“When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”

“And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.Alien they seemed to be;
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!"”

“It is commonly said that no man was ever converted by argument, but there is a single one which will make any Laodicean in England, let him be once love-sick, wear prayer-books and become a zealous Episcopalian – the argument that his sweetheart can be seen from his pew.”

“And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!”

“Work hard and be poor, do nothing and get more.”

“Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”

“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.”

“The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.”

“Ah, no; the years, the years;
Down their carved names the raindrop plows.”

“The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.”

“How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?”

“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.”

“Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.”

“The heath and changes of weather were quite blotted out from their eyes for the present. They were enclosed in a sort of luminous mist, which hid from them surroundings of any inharmonious colour, and gave to all things the character of light. When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills. They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one.”

“She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind — or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.”

“Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live for—that's all is the matter with me!”

“She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.”

“Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"”

“Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity.”

“I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.”

“We two kept house, the Past and I,
The Past and I;
I tended while it hovered nigh,
Leaving me never alone.”

“Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.”

“When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things?"”

“Aggressive Fancy working spells
Upon a mind o’erwrought.”

“See what deceits love sows in honest minds!”

“Good, but not religious-good.”

“Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere than on a celestial globe.”