War makes rattling good history.

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.

Never in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so persistently?

The first cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage.

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.

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.