Charlotte Brontë Quotes (1816-1855)

“Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.”

“Life, believe, is not a dream, So dark as sages say; Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day!”

“Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.”

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

“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

“Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants the horn-book, turning silk dresses and making children’s frocks.”

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

“The Lake country is a glorious region, of which I had only seen the similitude in dreams, waking or sleeping…I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales.”

“Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near an upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was.”

“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?”

“We wore a web in childhood,    A web of sunny air; We dug a spring in infancy    Of water pure and fair. We sowed in youth a mustard seed;    We cut an almond rod. We now are grown up to riper age:    Are they withered in the sod?”

“Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.”

“I had hardly ever seen a handsome youth; never in my life spoken to one. I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination; but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else that is bright but antipathetic.”

“‘Aire? Bah! I cannot say it. Well, our ship stopped in themorning, before it was quite daylight, at a great city—a hugecity, with very dark houses and all smoky; not at all like thepretty clean town I came from; and Mr. Rochester carriedme in his arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie cameafter, and we all got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house, larger than this and finer, called an hotel.We stayed there nearly a week: I and Sophie used to walkevery day in a great green place full of trees, called the Park; and there were many children there besides me, and a pondwith beautiful birds in it, that I fed with crumbs.’”

“The distant prospects were Anne's delight and when I look round she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon.”

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.”

“Emily is not very fond of teaching but she would nevertheless take care of the housekeeping, and though she is rather withdrawn she has too kind a heart not to do her utmost for the well-being of the children — she is also very generous soul...”

“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. … I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace (everyday) face; carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”

“It is observable that Matthew Arnold, the eldest son, and the author of the volume of poems to which you allude, inherits his mother's defect. Striking and prepossessing in appearance, his manner displeased from its seeming foppery. I own it caused me at first to regard him with regretful surprise; the shade of Dr. Arnold seemed to me to frown on his young representative. I was told, however, that "Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance." So it was: ere long a real modesty appeared under his assumed conceit, and some genuine intellectual aspirations, as well as high educational acquirements, displaced superficial affectations. I was given to understand that his theological opinions were very vague and unsettled, and indeed he betrayed as much in the course of conversation.”

“When I was fourteen I used to read literature in English. I read textbooks and the newspapers in Spanish, but when I really started to get into literature was when I started reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.”

“Feminists are in love with Charlotte Brontë. Yet the great summation of the travails of Charlotte's Jane Eyre was: "Reader, I married him." Reader, I married the boss. No, listen, that's just not good enough! Charlotte Brontë was a flaming racist. If you want to know where she stands, compare her with her sister, the antiracist Emily Brontë, who said, "I am Heathcliff": I am that man of color, who had been a street urchin. And that's just the beginning of what I think we have to do, not only if we are white, but whoever we are. We have to identify entirely with those with less power than ourselves: not only are we "with them"; we are "them." That way lies power for all of us, the end of the divisions, the end of the hierarchy and the flowering of real diversity and individuality.”

“You know that when the work entitled "Jane Eyre" appeared, with a fictitious name, it was said to be a work of too great power for any woman-that it must have been written by a man. It proved, however, to have been written by a woman.”

“(What attracted you to the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and made you use her for the basis of Wide Sargasso Sea?) RHYS: I had always wanted to write about her... I was annoyed about the poor lunatic West Indian, she's not a true character at all, unlike Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, so I wrote her life. Jane and Mr Rochester come completely to life in Jane Eyre, she doesn't, she's just such a horrible character.”

“Like Thackeray's daughters, I read Jane Eyre in childhood, carried away "as by a whirlwind." Returning to Charlotte Brontë's most famous novel, as I did over and over in adolescence, in my twenties, thirties, now in my forties, I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator's imagination, some nourishment I needed then and still need today.”