I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow

at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

X is largely considered as a thinlyveiled autobiography recounting problems with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle. It was his first novel in nine years, and the last that he would complete.
It is said that he poured everything into the book - his feelings about his own wasted talent and (self-perceived) professional failure and stagnation; his feelings about his parents who inspired the characters Dick and Nicole Diver; about his marriage, and his wifes illness, and psychiatry (about which he had learned during her treatment); about his affair with the actress Lois Moran, and his wifes with the French aviator Edouard Jozan.

Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Clusterd around by all her starry Fays.

It was in X that the author first employed the term "Wessex to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. The title of X refers to a frenzied escape from people in general which may be ironic as the five main characters Bathsheba, Troy, Boldwood, Oak, and Fanny Robin are all passionate beings who find life and people exciting and endearing .

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray; Along the cool sequester'd vale of life They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

That is no country for old men. The young In one anothers arms, birds in the trees Those dying generations at their song

X is the authors most important literary work .Its title was changed in 1931 to the more literal, In Search of Lost Time. Known for its length and its themes of involunatry memory- described using a madeleine, a small cake made in north eastern France , excerpts from X were rejected initially by Parisian publishers . The author of X once answered a certain set of questions .This lead to the making of a tool of personality analysis .

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

The best laid schemes of mice and men / Often go awry

No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if aPromontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;