Eliza

“Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“The act of quiet nighttime talking, illustrates for me more than anything else the curious alchemy of companionship.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd