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Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.
Charlotte Bronte -
I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you
Charlotte Bronte
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Life is still life, whatever its pangs; our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles must be silenced.
Charlotte Bronte -
I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed this sleepless night. I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to meet his eye.
Charlotte Bronte -
Amid the worry of a self- condemnatory soliloquy, his demeanour seemed grave, perhaps cold, both to me and his mother. And yet there was no bad feeling, no malice, no rancour, no littleness in his countenance, beautiful with a man's best beauty, even in its depression. When I placed his chair at the table, which I hastened to do, anticipating the servant, and when I handed him his tea, which I did with trembling care, he said: "Thank you, Lucy," in as kindly a tone of his full pleasant voice as ever my ear welcomed.
Charlotte Bronte -
You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.
Charlotte Bronte -
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?
Charlotte Bronte -
Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.
Charlotte Bronte
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Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
Charlotte Bronte -
Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.
Charlotte Bronte -
For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity.
Charlotte Bronte -
I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.
Charlotte Bronte -
If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.
Charlotte Bronte -
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.
Charlotte Bronte
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I would not be you for a kingdom.' The remark was too naïve to rouse anger; I merely said - 'Very good.' 'And what would you give to be ME?' she inquired. 'Not a bad sixpence - strange as it may sound', I replied. 'You are but a poor creature.' 'You don't think so in your heart.' 'No; for in my heart you have not the outline of a place: I only occasionally turn you over in my brain.
Charlotte Bronte -
I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world.
Charlotte Bronte -
Neither birth nor sex forms a limit to genius.
Charlotte Bronte -
I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities.
Charlotte Bronte -
Rochester: I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.
Charlotte Bronte -
It would not be wicked to love me." "It would to obey you.
Charlotte Bronte
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God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.
Charlotte Bronte -
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.
Charlotte Bronte -
You are human and fallible.
Charlotte Bronte -
If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.
Charlotte Bronte