Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

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

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love."

"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!"

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

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

"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."

"Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine."

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

"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."

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

"It is in 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."

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

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

"I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing."

"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."

"We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."

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

"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?"

"There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort."

"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."