English novelist (1816-1855)
I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
attributed, The Brontës
God did not give me my life to throw it away.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
Affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one's meaning are the usual rewards of candour.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter -- often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter -- in the eye.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud does to the electric death-spark hid in its womb.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
preface, Jane Eyre
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you -- and full as much heart!
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
Our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour.... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Villette