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.

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

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!

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

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?