Sarah Green-Hart > Sarah's Quotes

“I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom

“If you dear little girls would only learn what real beauty is, and not pinch and starve and bleach yourselves out so, you'd save an immense deal of time and money and pain. A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins

“[She was] kept there in the sort of embrace a man gives to the dearest creature the world holds for him.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins

“If she really had any doubt, the look in Dr. Alec's face banished it without a word, as he opened wide his arms and she ran into them, feeling that home was here.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins

“A happy soul in a healthy body makes the best sort of beauty for man or woman.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. ”
― C.S. Lewis

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
― C. S. Lewis

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

“Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art."

(Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times.)”
― Charles Dickens, Five Novels: Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations

“You talk very easily of hours, sir! How long do you suppose, sir, that an hour is to a man who is choking for want of air?”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“You can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn't do it when your uncle George was living much less when he's dead.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on doorsteps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink . . .”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“Mr F.'s Aunt, who had eaten her pie with great solemnity, and who had been elaborating some grievous scheme of injury in her mind since her first assumption of that public position on the Marshal's steps, took the present opportunity of addressing the following Sibyllic apostrophe to the relict of her late nephew.

'Bring him for'ard, and I'll chuck him out o' winder!'

Flora tried in vain to soothe the excellent woman by explaining that they were going home to dinner. Mr F.'s Aunt persisted in replying, 'Bring him for'ard and I'll chuck him out o' winder!' Having reiterated this demand an immense number of times, with a sustained glare of defiance at Little Dorrit, Mr F.'s Aunt folded her arms, and sat down in the corner of the pie-shop parlour; steadfastly refusing to budge until such time as 'he' should have been 'brought for'ard,' and the chucking portion of his destiny accomplished.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“He heard the thrill in her voice, he saw her earnest face, he saw her clear true eyes, he saw the quickened bosom that would have joyfully thrown itself before him to receive a mortal wound directed at his breast, with the dying cry, 'I love him!' and the remotest suspicion of the truth never dawned upon his mind.”
― Dickens, Charles

“He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without.”
― Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

“...his genius, during his earlier manhood, was of that exclusively agricultural character which applies itself to the cultivation of wild oats.”
― Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870

“That someone would mourn her death made her long to live in the fiercest way."

Alancia's Dance, Hall of Heroes Anthology”
― H. L. Burke

“Love seeks out that desperate, lonely, frightened place inside each of us and coaxes it out into the daylight, so that it can eviscerate it in the burning heat of the sun.”
― Cassondra Windwalker

“Books," he said, "are like mushrooms. They grow when you are not looking. Books increase by rule of compound interest: one interest leads to another interest, and this compounds into third. Next, you have so much interest there is no space in closet.”
― Tom Rachman, The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights