2nd June: Thomas Hardy quotes

10 quotes from Thomas Hardy, born on this date in 1840.

1. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
2. Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.
3. The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.
4. There is a condition worse than blindness, and that is, seeing something that isn't there.
5. Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.
6. A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.
7. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away.
8. Women can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.
9. I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger.
10. He had been held to her by a beautiful thread which it pained him to spoil by breaking, rather than by a chain he could not break.