'Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.'

'A man's silence is wonderful to listen to.'

'The sudden sense of newness, of change, reminded her how little she was at home in her environment, which, like a veil, had shielded her.'

'Hence, when a man of possibilities and faculties so useful if rightly applied as Michael Henchard's, was relegated to the lonely road of a new career, he trod it with no footsteps of doubt.'

'To Elizabeth-Jane the time was the gloomiest, saddest, and most puzzling of her young life; and yet that made it the most interesting.'

'She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called 'having a fancy for.' It is a poor synonym for love.'

'The cheerful town of Casterbridge was overlaid with the stillness of midnight.'

'Without the beyoundness the aforesaid views would have been merely commonplace surfaces.'

'The birds that do not migrate are now mainly silent; not completely silent, for it seems impossible for them to be that, but their August chatter is so markedly less vivacious than their talk in the first week-in-summer month as to seem almost a silence.'

The Mayor of Casterbridge