The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ (1886) ch. 20
She whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a
general drama of pain.
‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ (1886) ch. 45, closing words
It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither ghastly, hateful, nor
ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and
withal singularity colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who
have long lived a past, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face,
suggesting tragical possibilities.
‘The Return of the Native’ (1878) bk. 1, ch. 1 (Egdon Heath)
Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a
First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of a lower moral quality than
their own.
‘The Return of the Native’ (1878) bk. 6, ch. 1
A novel is an impression, not an argument.
‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (5th ed., 189?) preface
She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in
which she fancied herself such an anomaly.
‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (1891) ch. 14
The two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the
circumstantial will against enjoyment.
‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (1891) ch. 43
‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his
sport with Tess.
‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (1891) ch. 59
Good, but not religious-good.
‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ (1872) ch. 2
It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world...where, from time to time,
dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the
concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.
‘The Woodlanders’ (1887) ch. 1
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?
‘Afterwards’ (1917)
The bower we shrined to Tennyson,
Gentlemen,
Is roof-wrecked; damps there drip upon