Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecilit… - Thomas Hardy

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would had disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there

Distinction doesn't consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those whose are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report