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"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."
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"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
Explore more quotes by Charlotte Bronte


"The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye."


"What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage."


"Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us."


"To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,-Is such my future fate?The morn was dreary, must the eveBe also desolate?"


"If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it."


"If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and injust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they will never be afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again."


"When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart."


"Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace."


"And as for the vague something --- was it a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression? --- that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye, and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially disclosed; that something which used to make me fear and shrink, as if I had been wandering amongst volcanic-looking hills, and had suddenly felt the ground quiver, and seen it gape: that something, I, at intervals, beheld still; and with throbbing heart, but not with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only to dare --- to divine it; and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its secrets and analyse their nature."
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