"We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness."

"Whence comes solace? Not from seeing, What is doing, suffering, being; Not from noting Life’s conditions, Not from heeding Time’s monitions; But in cleaving to the Dream And in gazing at the Gleam Whereby gray things golden seem."

"Is your heart far away, Or with mine beating? When false things are brought low, And swift things have grown slow, Feigning like froth shall go, Faith be for aye."

"That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgement Day."

"I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires."

"They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined — just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around; And foreign constellations west Each night above his mound.Young Hodge the Drummer never knew — Fresh from his Wessex home — The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge forever be; His homely Northern breast and brain Grow to some Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally."

""Gone," I call them, gone for good, that group of local hearts and heads; Yet at mothy curfew-tide, And at midnight when the noon-heat breathes it back from walls and leads, They've a way of whispering to me—fellow-wight who yet abide."

"How fares the Truth now?—Ill? —Do pens but slily further her advance? May one not speed her but in phrase askance?"

"At once a voice outburst among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware."

"Still rule those minds on earth At whom sage Milton's wormwood words were hurled: ‘Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth’?"

"Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all to me, But as at first, when our day was fair."

"It's gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be."

"For incensed love breathes quick and dies, When famished love a-lingering lies."

"O, doth a bird deprived of wings Go earth-bound wilfully!"

"When Lawyers strive to heal a breach, And Parsons practise what they preach."

"Love is lovelier The more it shapes its moan in selfish-wise."

"Why did you give no hint that night That quickly after the morrow's dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quite, You would close your term here, up and be gone Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!"

"All the vast various moils that mean a world alive."

"For winning love we win the risk of losing, And losing love is as one's life were riven."

"Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge."

"The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race? By Me created? Sad its lot? Nay: I have no remembrance of such place: Such world I fashioned not."

"Numb as a vane that cankers on its point, True to the wind that kissed ere canker came."

"I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon.... O you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing — Not even I — would undo me so!"

"William Dewy, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough, Robert's kin, and John's, and Ned's, And the Squire, and Lady Susan, lie in Mellstock churchyard now!"

"Like chastened children sitting silent in a school."

"You may prate of your prowess in lusty times, But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays, And see too well your crimes!"

"I look into my glass, And viewing wasting skin, And say, ‘Would God it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!’For then, I, undistrest By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide."

"In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires, Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres. Over the mirrors meant To glass the opulent The sea-worm crawls — grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent."

"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!"

"If but some vengeful god would call to me From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing, Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!""

"Yet saw he something in the lives Of those who'd ceased to live That rounded them with majesty Which living failed to give."

"We two kept house, the Past and I, The Past and I; I tended while it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone."

"These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain."

"The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything."

"Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong."

"The beggarly question of parentage — what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people’s, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom."

"In the third-class seat sat the journeying boy, And the roof-lamp's oily flame Played down on his listless form and face, Bewrapt past knowing to what he was going, Or whence he came."

"Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!"

"Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable."

"Let me enjoy the earth no less Because the all-enacting Might That fashioned forth its loveliness Had other aims than my delight."

"Those house them best who house for secrecy."

"When I set out for Lyonnesse, A hundred miles away, The rime was on the spray, And starlight lit my lonesomeness When I set out for Lyonnesse A hundred miles away."

"And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, Till the Spinner of the Years Said "Now!" And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres."

"And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore."

"Done because we are too menny."

"Let him to whose ears the low-voiced Best seems stilled by the clash of the First, Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst, Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear, Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here."

"Patience, that blending of moral courage with physical timidity."

"So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment."

"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"

"He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity."