I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.

Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

...the figure near at hand suffers on such occasions, because it shows up its sorriness without shade; while vague figures afar off are honored, in that their distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it Tess?