This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?

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

I wish I had never been born--there or anywhere else.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. 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.

Sometimes I shrink from your knowing what I have felt for you, and sometimes I am distressed that all of it you will never know.

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin.

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