It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short… - Thomas Hardy

there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in.

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba's; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel's.

Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life — a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.