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“The senses created river beds of responses formed in part from the sediments, the waste, the overflow from the oiginal experience. A partial resemblance could stir what remained of the imperfectly rooted out love which had not died a natural death.”
― Spy In The House Of Love
― Spy In The House Of Love
“Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.”
― The Third Policeman
― The Third Policeman
“You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”
― The Third Policeman
"That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant.
I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about.”
― The Third Policeman
“How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.”
― Intermezzo
― Intermezzo
“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― The Third Policeman
― The Third Policeman
Works of Thomas Hardy
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A group to discuss all the works of Thomas Hardy, from poems to novels and everything in between. Also, this is a place to discuss the life and times ...more
Maddy’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Maddy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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