Charlotte Bronte Quotes
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But solitude is sadness.' 'Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.
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Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.
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Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
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Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.
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I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
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Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
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We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy Of water pure and fair; We sowed in youth a mustard seed, We cut an almond rod; We are now grown up to riper age Are they withered in the sod?
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Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.
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There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
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Neither birth nor sex forms a limit to genius.
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No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.
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I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
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I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.
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All these relics gave... Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.
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The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of the pitcher which I had flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last though it was dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. 'Is there a flood?' he cried...
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I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent.
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Shake me off, then, sir--push me away; for I'll not leave you of my own accord.
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I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.
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But I tell you - and mark my words - you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current.
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A reader kindly pointed out to me recently that most of the quotes I include are by men. And it's true. Personally, I don't even consider whether the author is male or female, nor even care much who the author is - what's significant is the message. Of course, women are equally capable of great insights, however in our culture it's not so long ago that women could not even be published...
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And with that answer, he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me down.
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There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?
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Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
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I would always rather be happy than dignified.