Jane Eyre / Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent / Agnes Grey Quotes

“The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.”
― Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre / Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent / Agnes Grey

“Yes Mrs Reed, to you i owe some fearful pangs of mental suffering, but i ought to forgive you, for you knew not what you did while rendering my heart strings, you thought you were only uprooting your bad propensities.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre / Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent / Agnes Grey

“I tell you I must go!’ I retorted, roused to something like passion. ‘Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? 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, The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey

“No, Jane,’ he returned: ‘what necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer – the Future so much brighter?”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey

“How can I do that? If you are true, and your offer real, my only feelings to you must be gratitude and devotion – they cannot torture.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey

“Am I a liar in your eyes?’ he asked passionately. ‘Little sceptic, you shall be convinced. What love have I for Miss Ingram? None: and that you know. What love has she for me? None: as I have taken pains to prove: I caused a rumour to reach her that my fortune was not a third of what was supposed, and after that I presented myself to see the result; it was coldness both from her and her mother. I would not – I could not – marry Miss Ingram. You – you strange, you almost unearthly thing! – I love you as my own flesh. You – poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are – I entreat to accept me as a husband.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey