Sue Bridehead Quotes

“At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own. When I first knew you I merely wanted you to love me. I did not exactly flirt with you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and when I found I had caught you, I was frightened. And then--I don't know how it was-- I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella again--and so I got to love you, Jude. But you see, however fondly it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart ache for me without letting mine ache for you.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“--the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man...”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom--hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air!”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“You don't talk quite like a girl who has had no advantages.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“I have sometimes thought--that under the affectation of independent views you are as enslaved to the social code as any woman I know!”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“Perhaps you are making a cat's paw of me with Phillotson all this time. Upon my word it almost seems so--to see you sitting up there so prim.”
― Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

“I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies...”
― Thomas Hardy