Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

"Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony."

"She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun."

"The curious double strands in Farfrae's thread of life - the commercial and the romantic - were very distinct at times. Like the colours in a variegated cord those contrasts could be seen intertwisted, yet not mingling."

"I won't be a slave to the past. I'll love where I choose."

"He was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then."

"Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we never find in ourselves or or in our friends..."

"Her suspense was terrible."

"Though when at home their countenances varied with the seasons, their market faces all the year round were glowing little fires."

"She had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly."

"If she had not been imprudence incarnate, she would not have acted as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two later."

"She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of time and chance, except perhaps fair play"

"And all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape."

"Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him."

"It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers."

"She seemed to be occupied with of inner chamber of ideas and to have slight need for visible objects."

"Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

"Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly... Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression."

"The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her, and walked with her, in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain."

"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."