Oak had nothing finished and ready to say as yet, and not being able to frame love phrases which end where they begin; passionate tales — — Full of … - Thomas Hardy

Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

...Reminiscence is less an endowment than a disease, and expectation in its only comfortable form — that of absolute faith — is practically an impossibility; whilst in the form of hope and the secondary compounds, patience, impatience, resolve, curiosity, it is a constant fluctuation between pleasure and pain.

The rarest offerings of the purest loves are but a self-indulgence, and no generosity at all. Bathsheba,