Thomas Hardy Quotes on Time
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When false things are brought low, And swift things have grown slow, Feigning like froth shall go, Faith be for aye.
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Here by the baring bough Raking up leaves, Often I ponder how Springtime deceives,- I, an old woman now, Raking up leaves.
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We two kept house, the Past and I, The Past and I; I tended while it hovered nigh, Leaving me never alone.
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And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, Till the Spinner of the Years Said 'Now!' And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.
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I seem but a dead man held on end To sink down soon.... O you could not know That such swift fleeing No soul foreseeing - Not even I - would undo me so!
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Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk. Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass. Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by: War's annals will cloud into night Ere their story die.
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I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion.
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Ah, no; the years, the years; Down their carved names the raindrop plows.
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The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
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The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
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She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.
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But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that.
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Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.