All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun

He is a sort of steady man in a wild way, you know. That’s better than to be as some are, wild in a steady way. I am afraid that’s how I am

The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind

The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility

No average man will molest a woman by day or night, at home or abroad, unless she invites him. Until she says by a look “Come on” he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look it, he never comes

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

The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of them to fervour of sensation any more

By experience,” says Roger Ascham, “we find out a short way by a long wandering

Very well,” said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever

He had sunk from his modest elevation as pastoral king into the very slime pits of Siddim; but there was left to him a dignified calm he had never before known, and that indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not. And thus the abasement had been exaltation, and the loss gain

He admired her so much that he used to light the candle three times a night to look at her

She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him

What was the past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing altogether. I became another woman, filled full of new life from you. How could I be the early one? Why do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a little more conceited, and believe in yourself so far as to see that you was strong enough to work this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to come to me, your poor wife

She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen and among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold relation?

Those who have the power of reproaching in silence may find it a means more effective than words. There are accents in the eye which are not on the tongue, and more tales come from pale lips than can enter an ear. It is both the grandeur and the pain of the remoter moods that they avoid the pathway of sound

Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!

The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven’t they? -that is, seem as if they had. And the river says,-‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?’ And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand further away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!

To find themselves utterly alone at night where company is desirable and expected makes some people fearful; but a case more trying by far to the nerves is to discover some mysterious companionship when intuition, sensation, memory, analogy, testimony, probability, induction – every kind of evidence in the logician’s list – have united to persuade consciousness that it is quite alone

But since ’tis as ’tis, why, it might have been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly

War makes rattling good history

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary… She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind – or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformideable, even pitiable, in its units

She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

And yet you take away the one little ewe-lamb of pleasure that I have in this dull life of mine. Well, perhaps generosity is not a woman’s most marked characteristic

And from a quiet modesty that would have become a vestal, which seemed continually to impress upon him that he had no great claim on the world’s room, Oak walked unassumingly and with a faintly perceptible bend, yet distinct from a bowing of the shoulders

The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible

You are nothing to me – nothing,” said Troy, heartlessly. “A ceremony before a priest doesn’t make a marriage. I am not morally yours

In heaven she will probably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow

This good-fellowship – camaraderie – usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely.

She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were cast

In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked that she was, and forgot that the defective can more than the entire

She was but a transient impression, half forgotten

Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him

I have seen your mother; and I will never see her again!

O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the froth

Such miserable creatures of circumstance are we all!

They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they

Sheer experience had already taught her that in some circumstances there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any life whatever.

Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with trouble.

To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country’s history;

The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.

Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no – they were not perfect. and it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity

Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came

Ah, if I could only make your dear heart ache one little minute of each day as mine does every day and all day long, it might lead you to show pity to your poor lonely one.

You could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then

I thought you were the ghost of yourself

I have danced at your skittish heels, my beautiful Bathsheba, for many a long mile and many a long day

I have nobody in the world to fight my battles for me; but no mercy is shown. Yet if a thousand of you sneer and say things against me, I will not be put down!

The best fiction is truer than history.

The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water, the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would not have known they were shining overhead if she had not seen them there – the vastest things of the universe imaged in objects so mean

Judge me by my future works.

I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?

He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner: call on the husband to look at the wife: be eager to pay and intend to owe

But nobody did come, because nobody does;

We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more

The reason of that is,” she said eagerly, “that he goes in privately by the old tower door, just when the service commences, and sits at the back of the gallery. He told me so.” This supreme instance of Troy’s goodness fell upon Gabriel ears like the thirteenth stroke of crazy clock. It was not only received with utter incredulity as regarded itself, but threw a doubt on all the assurances that had preceded it

The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him

Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly… Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression

Truth like a bastard comes into the world Never without ill-fame to him who gives her birth

There is a loquacity that tells nothing, which was Bathsheba’s; and there is a silence which says much: that was Gabriel’s

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you

Many of her thoughts were perfect syllogisms; unluckily they always remained thoughts. Only a few were irrational assumptions; but, unfortunately, they were the ones which most frequently grew into deeds

Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence

Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence

Mrs. d’Urberville was not the first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be bitterly fond

Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ‘Here!’ to a body’s cry of ‘Where?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on

Rolliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for consumers was strictly limited to a little board.

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession; with totally differing aims the method is the same on both sides. But the understood incentive on the woman’s part was wanting here. Besides, Bathsheba’s position as absolute mistress of a farm and house was a novel one, and the novelty had not yet begun to wear off

Deeds of endurance, which seem ordinary in philosophy, are rare in conduct

Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his body?

After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again – to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them

There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity – even the reverse, indeed, and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete

But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I didn’t need what I could have, and now I be poor I can’t have what I need!

Tess was awake before dawn – at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken

Having begun to love you, I love you for ever – in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself

I forgot the defective can be more than the whole

Your eyes are to be my stars for the future

All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons

Is a woman a thinking unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?

The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ‘ll be like thousands’s and thousands

Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.

December morning – sunny and exceedingly mild – might have regarded Gabriel

That cold accretion called the world, so terrible in the mass, is so non formidable, even pitiable, in its units

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore

It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in

It was Wisdom in the abstract facing Folly in the concrete

You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton

A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.

An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness

Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done?

To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness, or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind, or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin, the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding

Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women do when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away

The cruelty of fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment

An Elizabeth in brain and a Mary Stuart in spirit

She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet – a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness.

Alive enough to have strength to die

To be conscious that the end of a dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end

Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all – in fact, it rather does it good

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child

Like the British Constitution, she owes her success in practice to her inconsistencies in principle

It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town

Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway weeping – not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great-aunt for life

I am not a fool, you know, although I am a woman, and have my woman’s moments

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkle from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. Yet

It was still early, and the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess’s eyelashes, and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty

And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored

The sky was clear – remarkably clear – and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse.

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired – that intrusive creature, that bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law; a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the cottage interior was the universe, the week’s weather climate, new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge

Biblioll College. Sir, – I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully, T. Tetuphenay. To Mr. J. Fawley, Stone-mason

And intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles

I want to question my belief, so that what is left after I have questioned it, will be even stronger

If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now

Sometimes more bitterness is sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life;

We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy – a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason

Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a body’s cry of “Where?

Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case they may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s license to receive it

It was terribly beautiful to Tess today, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing

There is always an inertia to be overcome in striking out a new line of conduct – not more in ourselves, it seems, than in circumscribing events, which appear as if leagued together to allow no novelties in the way of amelioration

Gabriel’s malignant star was assuredly setting fast

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby corner of God’s allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the conjecturally damned are laid

O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried. “Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity?

Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse

Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.

But what between the poor men I won’t have, and the rich men who won’t have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!

My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all

Gabriel Oak: “It’s time for you to fight your own battles… and win them too

All things merge in one another – good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics..

When farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread, till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to mere chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature

Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet again after we are dead? I want to know.” He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time. “O, Angel – I fear that means no!” said she, with a suppressed sob. “And I wanted so to see you again – so much, so much! What – not even you and I, Angel, who love each other so well?

Yes; quaint and curious war is! You shoot a fellow down you’d treat if met where any bar is, or help to half-a-crown

The spring came and calmed her; the summer came and soothed her; the autumn arrived, and she began to be comforted, for her little girl was strong and happy, growing in size and knowledge every day.

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it

Women are attracted to silent men. They believe they are listening

Remember that the best and greatest among mankind are those who do themselves no worldly good. Every successful man is more or less a selfish man. The devoted fail.

The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines

Peace and war kiss each other at their hours of preparation – sickles, scythes, shears, and pruning-hooks, ranking with swords, bayonets, and lances, in their common necessity for point and edge

I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion

New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not

She was of the stuff of which great men’s mothers are made. She was indispensable to high generation, hated at tea parties, feared in shops, and loved at crises

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel

Let truth be told – women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the “betrayed” as some amiable theorists would have us believe

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art

So do flux and reflux – the rhythm of change – alternate and persist in everything under the sky.

If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single we do

Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence

Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Life is an oasis which is submerged in the swirling waves of sorrows and agonies

That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find, to equal among human kind, a dog’s fidelity!

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover

He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness

There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating

What are my books but one plea against “man’s inhumanity to man” – to woman – and to the lower animals?

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading

Dazzled by brass and scarlet – O, Bathsheba – this is a woman’s folly indeed!

He wished she knew his impressions, but he would as soon as thought of carrying an odour in a net as of attempting to convey the intangibles of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language. So he remained silent

Women accept their destiny more readily than men.

So each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, or at least some remote and distant hope.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes

It was then that the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you from spinning where you wanted to spin

Women are so strange in their influence that they tempt you to misplaced kindness

People go on marrying because they can’t resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month’s pleasure with a life’s discomfort

Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?

You overrate my capacity of love. I don’t posess half the warmth of nature you believe me to have. An unprotected childhood in a cold world has beaten gentleness out of me

I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

You ride well, but you don’t kiss nicely at all.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed

All romances end at marriage

That it would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summertime!

Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it Tess?

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light

But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small