Ideal conception, necessitated by ignorance of the person so imagined, often results in an incipient love, which otherwise would never have existed. - Thomas Hardy

This good-fellowship — camaraderie — usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.

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.

La bellezza per lei, come per tutti quelli che hanno molto sentito, non risiedeva nelle cose ma in ciò che esse simboleggiavano