|
d01be8a
|
It is always the way of events in this life...no sooner have you got settled in a pleasant resting place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
c25585c
|
I know my maker sanctions what I do. For the world's judgement - I wash my hands thereof. For man's opinion- I defy it
|
|
classic
inspirational
romance
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
1756109
|
To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts--when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break--at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent--I am ever tender and true.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
df88b12
|
I was at once content and stimulated with what I saw: I liked what I had seen, and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you distantly, and sought your company rarely. I was an intellectual epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this novel and piquant acquaintance: besides, I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade-the sweet charm of freshness w..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
9e87c51
|
But you know very well you are thinking of another they, and that he is not thinking of you
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
ca38c56
|
Left alone, I was passive; repulsed, I withdrew; forgotten -- my lips would not utter, nor my eyes dart a reminder.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
28ee875
|
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was ..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
36c2043
|
What good it would have done me at that time to have been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling like, and to have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the calm amidst which I now repined!
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
2d90eca
|
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 |
|
4ef8e43
|
There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
f387128
|
Yes Mrs Reed, to you i owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering, but i ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did while rendering my heart strings, you thought you were only uprooting your bad propensities.
|
|
jane-eyre
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
551d33e
|
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture -- still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of h..
|
|
novelists
real-life-facts
writing-process
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
867e597
|
I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and conscience, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
dcd4b81
|
I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation.
|
|
faculties
servitude
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
270588d
|
Hopeless of the future, I wished but this- that my Maker had that night thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
abd8001
|
He is not to them what he is to me,' I thought: 'he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine - I am sure he is - I feel akin to him - I understand the language of his countenance and movements: thought rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say, a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive my salary at his hands? d..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
a7216d1
|
It is not saying too much; I know what I feel, and how averse are my inclinations to the bare thought of marriage. No one would take me for love; and I will not be regarded in the light of a mere money-speculation. And I do not want a stranger--unsympathizing, alien, different from me. I want my kindred--those with whom I have full fellow-feeling.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
f1e7cd2
|
His idea was still with me, because it was not a vapor sunshine could disperse, nor a sand-traced effigy storms could wash away; it was a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it inscribed. The craving to know what had become of him followed me everywhere.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
a43ec7d
|
This night is not calm; the equinox still struggles in its storms. The wild rains of the day are abated; the great single cloud disparts and rolls away from heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sapphire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight tempest. The Moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale, as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with love. No Endymion will watch for his goddess ton..
|
|
charlotte-bronte
melancholy
nature
romance
shirley
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
f7c10c0
|
He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon, and that is all. [...] Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love [...] and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo it.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
f82f013
|
This harsh little man -- this pitiless censor -- gathers up all your poor scattered sins of vanity, your luckless chiffon of rose- color, your small fringe of a wreath, your small scrap of ribbon, your silly bit of lace, and calls you to account for the lot, and for each item. You are well habituated to be passed by as a shadow in Life's sunshine: it its a new thing to see one testily lifting his hand to screen his eyes, because you tease h..
|
|
villette
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
b249add
|
People talk of natural sympathies ; I have heard of good genii ; there are grains of truth in the wildest fable.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
33afb00
|
naWh lmn Husn lTl` 'naW lzmn yukhmd ltwq l~ lntqm, wyuskt Hwfz lGyZ wlnfwr.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
a9b4684
|
Estoy segura de que nunca confundire la falta de buenas formas con la insolencia. Lo primero me parece bien; a lo segundo, ningun ser humano nacido libre debe someterse, ni siquiera por un sueldo.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
3f4283b
|
Coldest the remembrance of the wider ocean--wealth, caste, custom intervened between me and what I naturally and inevitably loved.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
d74732c
|
The Lowood constraint still clings to you somewhat; controlling your features, muffling your voice, and restricting your limbs; and you fear in the presence of a man and a brother--or father, or master, or what you will--to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly: but, in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you; and then your looks and movements will have more vi..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
3710b32
|
Eight years! you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the time in such a place would have done up any constitution! No wonder you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face. When you came on me in Hay Lane last night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse: I am not sure yet.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
9da7077
|
Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
6243a24
|
Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea in their displeasure?
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
1a916de
|
I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,' said Diana, 'during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you - he will make it up.' I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified; and I ran after him - he stood at the foot of the stairs.
|
|
embarassment
happiness
pride
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
b91668d
|
There are people whom a lowered position degrades morally, to whom loss of connection costs loss of self-respect: are not these justified in placing the highest value on that station and association which is their safeguard from debasement? If a man feels that he would become contemptible in his own eyes were it generally known that his ancestry were simple and not gentle, poor and not rich, workers and not capitalists, would it be right se..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
5257a1e
|
Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp: for I was still incredulous. "Do you doubt me, Jane?" "Entirely." "You have no faith in me?"
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
39b5f4a
|
Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment--with which ..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
d68dfb1
|
Your dress is thin, you have been dancing, you are heated." "Always preaching," retorted she; "always coddling and admonishing." The answer Dr. John would have given did not come; that his heart was hurt became evident in his eye; darkened, and saddened, and pained, he turned a little aside, but was patient."
|
|
dr-john-graham-bretton
ginevra-fanshawe
unrequited-love
villette
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
867ab3e
|
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman -- almost a bride, was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects were desolate.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
c6c7e25
|
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 priviledged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing o..
|
|
feminism
feminist
jane-eyre
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
e2f230c
|
Picture me then idle, basking, plump, and happy, stretched on a cushioned deck, warmed with constant sunshine, rocked by breezes indolently soft.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
f3a0bde
|
Keep to your caste and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul and strength where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
65442ad
|
With what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged!
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
cac5904
|
I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
0a6e25d
|
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
d305902
|
You," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You gifted with the power of pleasing him? You of importance to him in any way? Go! your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to a dependent and a novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe!--Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the b..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
86936e0
|
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?
|
|
jane-eyre
|
Charlotte Brontë |
|
b067482
|
at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to be commenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvelous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dreamscenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits, wider plains, drearier deserts, ..
|
|
|
Charlotte Brontë |