"... your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me..."

"You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it."

"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."

"And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame."

"Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties."

"Your will shall decide your destiny."

"It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my little friend on such weary travels: but if I can't do better, how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was still. "Because, he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, - you'd forget me."

"I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide."

"Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime."

"I believe - I daily find it proved - that we can get nothing in this world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a conviction, except out of purifying flame, or through strengthening peril. We err; we fall; we are humbled - then we walk more carefully. We greedily eat and drink poison out of the gilded cup of vice, or from the beggar's wallet of avarice; we are sickened, degraded; everything good in us rebels against us; our souls rise bitterly indignant against our bodies; there is a period of civil war; if the soul has strength, it conquers and rules thereafter."

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

"Beauty is given to dolls, majesty to haughty vixens, but mind, feeling, passion and the crowning grace of fortitude are the attributes of an angel."

"My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!"

"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."

"Whatever my powers--feminine or the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal."

"Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds; when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when, while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line - that then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen - that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach."

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

"If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!"

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will."

"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."

"Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings."

"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."

"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."

"I knew you would do me good in some way, at some time--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you."

"I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. John's last hour: his mind will be unclouded; his heart will be undaunted; his hope will be sure; his faith steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this: "My Master, he says, "has forewarned me. Daily he announces more distinctly, 'Surely I come quickly!' and hourly I more eagerly respond, 'Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!"

"I used to rush into strange dreams at night: dreams many-coloured, agitated, full of the ideal, the stirring, the stormy--dreams where, amidst unusual scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some exciting crisis; and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving him, being loved by him--the hope of passing a lifetime at his side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering; and then the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and heard the burst of passion."

"I had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not to deviate an inch from the beaten centre."

"Our honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine."

"Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes."

"The horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white."

"Let your performance do the thinking."

"He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down."

"But if I feel, may I never express? "Never! declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination - her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope."

"If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."

"Existence was never originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest."

"I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished."

"Human feelings are queer things -- I am much happier -- black-leading the stove's -- making the beds and sweeping the floors at home, than I should be living like a fine lady anywhere else."

"Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure."

"Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment:is it not?"

"I must not forget that these coarsely-clad little peasants are of flesh and blood as good as the scions of the gentlest genealogy; and that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the best born. My duty will be to develop these germs: surely I shall find some happiness in discharging that office."

"Take the matter as you find it ask no questions, utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. You expected bread and you have got a stone: break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrised; do not doubt that your mental stomach - if you have such a thing - is strong as an ostrich's; the stone will digest. You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation; close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob."

"You think too much of your "toilette", Adele; but you may have a flower." I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sign of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress; there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress."

"Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life."

"I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame."

"For once a hope was realized. I held in my hand a morsel of real solid joy: not a dream, not an image of the brain, not one of those shadowy chances imagination pictures, and on which humanity starves but cannot live."

"But as his wife - at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked - forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital - this would be unendurable."

"You have not wept at all! I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but no trace of tears. I suppose then, your heart has been weeping blood?"

"Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness " to glory?"

"I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here."

"My feelings towards it can only be paralleled by that of a doting parent towards an idiot child."