Well, these sad and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to look with indifference upon the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in.

A blaze of love and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection there.

I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story.

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

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.