p. 56 And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.
p. 116 [Elizabeth-Jane] sat up with her mother to the utmost of her strength night after night. To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker way than to watch - to be a "waker," as the country-people call it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge - barring the rare sound of the watchman - was broken in Elizabeth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking frantically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that would release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos called consciousness, which spin in her at this moment like a top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was awake, yet she was asleep.
p. 157 "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so!"
p. 172 The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and friendship - that period in the history of a love when alone it can be said to be unalloyed with pain.
p. 184 [The fortune teller] was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house, when at church they professed so much and believed so little.
p. 192 Nearly the whole town had gone into the fields. The Casterbridge populace still retained the primitive habit of helping one another in time of need; and thus, though the corn belonged to the farming section of the little community - that inhabiting the Durnover quarter - the remainder was no less interested in the labour of getting it home."
p. 231 "If I could afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times of my life. 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!"
p. 317 And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him…. Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"
p. 332 …[Elizabeth-Jane] thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.
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