Thomas Hardy Quotes

Tears may be dried up, but the heart - never.

Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.

I’ve lived to bury my desires, And see my dreams corrode with rust; Now all that’s left are fruitless fires That burn my empty heart to dust.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

Not everything you wanted, deep inside, worked out.

Count not thyself to have found true peace, if thou hast felt no grief; nor that then all is well if thou hast no adversary; nor that this is perfect, if all things fall out according to thy desire.

Love with someone else, an actual person, was another matter. People got hurt doing that. People cried and wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked with loss. Loving words got turned to fierce, sharp, whip-cracks of anger that lefft permanent marks. At the least, it disappointed you. At most, it damaged you.

What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired - a word which here means 'happened, and made everybody sad'.

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say goodbye.

The origin of sorrow is this: to wish for something that does not come to pass.

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.

Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.

What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.

My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

The events we most desire do not happen; or, if they do, it is neither in the time nor in the circumstances when they would have given us extreme pleasure.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

Any happiness, no matter how brief, seemed better than the long, simmering torture of waking up day after day, knowing I could never have him.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

Recognizing that there is more heartbreak in continuous disappointment than a void.

. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.

There are some losses we never get over.