“A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.” “We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.” “In making even horizontal and clear inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in.” “I don’t see why a maid should take a husband when she’s bold enough to fight her own battles.” Keen Insights “It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession.” She was indispensable to high generation, feared at tea-parties, hated in shops, and loved at crises.” “She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. “Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.” “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” “The real sin ma’am, in my mind lies in thinking of ever wedding with a man you don’t love honest and true.” Feminist Hardy Is Feminist Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death-that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam.” “This good fellowship-camaraderie-usually occurring through the 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.

She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition.

One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion.

When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. “Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. “He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.”

Far from the madding crowd book