Quotes by Charlotte Brontë

Come, Paul! she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried -My heart will break!What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the whisper, Trust me! lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet with relief - I wept.Leave her to me; it is a crisis: I will give her a cordial, and it will pass, said the calm Madame Beck.To be left to her and her cordial seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly - Laissez-moi! in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving.Laissez-moi! he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke.But this will never do, said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman -Sortez dici!I will send for Père Silas: on the spot I will send for him, she threatened pertinaciously.Femme! cried the Professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his highest and most excited key, Femme! sortez à linstant!He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what I had yet felt.What you do is wrong, pursued Madame; it is an act characteristic of men of your unreliable, imaginative temperament; a step impulsive, injudicious, inconsistent - a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character.You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me, said he, but you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste, he continued less fiercely, be gentle, be pitying, be a woman; look at this poor face, and relent. You know I am your friend, and the friend of your friends; in spite of your taunts, you well and deeply know I may be trusted. Of sacrificing myself I made no difficulty but my heart is pained by what I see; it must have and give solace. Leave me!This time, in the leave me there was an intonation so bitter and so imperative, I wondered that even Madame Beck herself could for one moment delay obedience; but she stood firm; she gazed upon him dauntless; she met his eye, forbidding and fixed as stone. She was opening her lips to retort; I saw over all M. Pauls face a quick rising light and fire; I can hardly tell how he managed the movement; it did not seem violent; it kept the form of courtesy; he gave his hand; it scarce touched her I thought; she ran, she whirled from the room; she was gone, and the door shut, in one second.The flash of passion was all over very soon. He smiled as he told me to wipe my eyes; he waited quietly till I was calm, dropping from time to time a stilling, solacing word. Ere long I sat beside him once more myself - re-assured, not desperate, nor yet desolate; not friendless, not hopeless, not sick of life, and seeking death.It made you very sad then to lose your friend? said he.It kills me to be forgotten, Monsieur, I said.

His veins were dark with a vivid belladonna tincture, the essence of jealousy.

Entering by the carré, a piece of mirror- glass, set in an oaken cabinet, repeated my image. It said I was changed: my cheeks and lips were sodden white, my eyes were glassy, and my eyelids swollen and purple.On rejoining my companions, I knew they all looked at me - my heart seemed discovered to them: I believed myself self-betrayed. Hideously certain did it seem that the very youngest of the school must guess why and for whom I despaired.

I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win.

There are certain natures of which the mutual influence is such, that the more they say, the more they have to say. For these out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion, amalgamation.

His mind has the clearness of the deep sea, the patience of its rocks, the force of its billows.

Ill walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.

St. John,” I said, “I think you are al­most wicked to talk so. I am dis­posed to be as con­tent as a queen, and you try to stir me up to rest­less­ness! To what end?”“To the end of turn­ing to profit the tal­ents which God has committed to your keep­ing; and of which He will surely one day de­mand a strict ac­count. Jane, I shall watch you closely and anx­iously—I warn you of that. And try to re­strain the dis­pro­por­tion­ate fervour with which you throw your­self into com­mon­place home pleasures. Don’t cling so tena­ciously to ties of the flesh; save your con­stancy and ar­dour for an ad­e­quate cause; for­bear to waste them on trite tran­sient ob­jects. Do you hear, Jane?”“Yes; just as if you were speak­ing Greek. I feel I have ad­e­quate cause to be happy, and I will be happy. Good­bye!

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

Im a universal patriot...my country is the world.

My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I looked at my love: that feeling which had been my masters --- which he had created; it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a cold cradle; sickness and anguish had seized it; it could not seek Mr Rochesters arms --- it could not derive warmth from his breast. Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted -- confidence destroyed!

Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherds can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.

Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations.How do you know? -- how can you guess all this, sir?I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary.

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiads head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrows nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom.

I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [ . . . ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered--not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!

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.

Graham’s thoughts of me were not entirely those of a frozen indifference, after all. I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written ‘Lucy’s Room.’ I kept a place for him too — a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand — yet, released from that hold and constriction, I knew not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.

Once I saw Graham - wholly unconscious of her proximity - push her with his restless foot. She receded an inch or two. A minute after one little hand stole out from beneath her face, to which it had been pressed, and softly caressed the heedless foot.

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 mans 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.

How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.