The Return of the Native

 Apparently, all the sinful thoughts might get punished after all.
 And here comes the question: Why hesitate if the payback is anyway waiting at the end of the road?
 Eustacia's wish of doing everything in perfection has led her to an epic fail. She was changing her present for the future. But what a surprise - she did not make it in that future.
Living the moment should enormously preoccupy us instead of just dreaming ecstatic days to come.
 I consider this book an exquisite impulse for us, dreamers, to live, to return to our native feelings and to savor'em.

Catchy quotes from this book:

- Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike.
- On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess  that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her gasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of the government.
- Though idle people might call it work, working people would call it play.
- ...where any man could imagine himself to be Adam without least difficulty.
- It was braided according to a calendaristic system: the more important the day the more numerous the strands in the braid. On ordinary working-days she braided it in threes; on ordinary Sundays in fours; at May-polings, gipsying, and in the like she braided it in fives. Years ago she had said that when she married she would braid it in sevens. It was braided in sevens to-day.
- It is bad when your fame outruns your means.
 - There is no use in hating people - if you hate anything, you should hate what product time.
- In the social sphere these gifted ones are mostly women; they can watch a world which they never saw, and estimate forces of which they have only heard. We call it intuition.
 - But if she makes you a good wife, there has never been a bad one.
- How is it that she can be married so soon? - By the will of God and a ready young man, I suppose.
- Though she was no lover of money, she loved what money could bring.
- Single men have, no doubt, a right to curse themselves as much as they please; but men with wives involve two in the doom they pray down.
- In common consсience every man ought either to marry or to go for a soldier.