Becky > Becky's Quotes

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

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? 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. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Reader, I married him.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

“I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery...”
― Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

“I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience.”
― Flannery O'Connor