Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

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

appearance should not be mistaken for truth;

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting:

This reproach of my dependence had become a vague sing-song in my ear: very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible.

Why was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for ever condemned?

Why could I never please?

Why was it useless to try to win any ...

All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be so;

what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself to death? That certainly was a crime: and was I fit to die?

while rending my heart-strings, you thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities.

Vain favour! coming, like most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late!

“Come, Miss Jane, don’t cry,” said Bessie as she finished. She might as well have said to the fire, “don’t burn!”

I cry because I am miserable.”

To speak truth, I had not the least wish to go into company, for in company I was very rarely noticed;

glancing round occasionally to make sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room;

What a miserable little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of me in those days!

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce speaking; fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than that of sombre indignation.

I stood, a wretched child enough, whispering to myself over and over again, “What shall I do?—what shall I do?”

“If you dread them they’ll dislike you.”

Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

I stood lonely enough: but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed; it did not oppress me much.

“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”

“A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse.

“It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”

I will do my best; it is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer.

I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

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 arrived, green and strong!

He made me love him without looking at me.

But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?

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

it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.

Human beings never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for a different destiny to the rest of my species: to imagine such a lot befalling me is a fairy tale—a day-dream.”

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven.

you speak of her with hate—with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel—she cannot help being mad.”

I have for the first time found what I can truly love—I have found you.

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

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; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be.

What was I? In the midst of my pain of heart and frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself.

I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die: but I was soon up;

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away my liberty of mind: his praise and notice were more restraining than his indifference.

As for me, 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.

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.