Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

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

"Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition."

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

"Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear."

"All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever."

"My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive."

"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! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!"

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last."

"To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking."

"[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine."

"Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you."

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

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last."

"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?"

"It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication."

"I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience."

"Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength."

"I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate."

"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."

"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."