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.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one.

You, and those like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

Do you know that I have undergone three quarters of this labour entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?

That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units.