"IT WAS THEY THAT WERE OUT OF HARMONY WITH THE ACTUAL WORLD, NOT SHE."
"She thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like was a composer's power who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name and never would have a clue to his personality."
"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 knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralise each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least-possible dimensions. 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 unformidable, even pitiable, in its units."
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy