you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.

The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness.

O, you have torn my life all to pieces... made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be again!

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be— and whenever I look up, there will be you. -Gabriel Oak

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.