Thomas Hardy

“ What with lack of employment, owing to the decrease of his late father's practice, and the absence of direct and uncompromising pressure towards monetary results from a pupil's labour (which seems to be always the case when a professional man's pupil is also his son) , Owen's progress in the art and science of architecture had been very insignificant indeed. Though anything but an idle young man, he had hardly reached the age at which industrious men who lack an external whip to send them on in the world, are induced by their own common sense to whip on themselves. ”

“ He chanced to be in want of some young man in his office--for a short time only, probably about two months--to trace drawings, and attend to other subsidiary work of the kind. If Mr. Graye did not object to occupy such an inferior position as these duties would entail, and to accept weekly wages which to one with his expectations would be considered merely nominal, the post would give him an opportunity for learning a few more details of the profession.
'It is a beginning, and, above all, an abiding-place, away from the shadow of the cloud which hangs over us here--I will go,' said Owen. ”

“ But unfortunately, poverty, whilst it is new, and before the skin has had time to thicken, makes people susceptible inversely to their opportunities for shielding themselves. In Owen was found, in place of his father's impressibility, a larger share of his father's pride, and a squareness of idea which, if coupled with a little more blindness, would have amounted to positive prejudice. ”

“ The undoubted truth, that they were the children of a dreamer who let slip away every farthing of his money and ran into debt with his neighbours--that the daughter had been brought up to no profession--that the son who had, had made no progress in it, and might come to the dogs--could not from the nature of things be wrapped up in silence in order that it might not hurt their feelings ”

“ Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think of us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means, parentage, or object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon in isolation. It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most ”