"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."
"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last."
"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 no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."
"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 had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me."