Let’s be honest: Jane Eyre For the cheerful, it can be difficult to get through. Then it turns into a Gothic tragic romance with jealousy, forbidden loves, hauntings, and hidden spouse. Despite her misfortunes, she is still a good person. Jane remains shockingly clear-headed and practical throughout Charlotte Bronte’s famous novel. She drops some big truth bombs, and together with Mr. Rochester, she creates some of the finest prose ever written.
So if you haven’t read Jane Eyre These quotes might inspire you to grab a copy. If you have already, you can go all the way back in your high school English lit class. The point is, this Bronte book’s a classic, but if this isn’t your cup of tea, we get it. These quotes alone are enough to show you the book’s beauty and charm. We’ve collected over 100 of the best Jane Eyre Quotes to peruse on a dark, stormy night.
- I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
- I would always rather be happy than dignified.
- Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? I can bear to have my bread taken from my lips and my glass of water emptied from my cup. You think that because I’m poor, poor, plain, and small, I’m soulless, heartless, and without soul? You think wrong!
- I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more understand I am, the more I will respect myself.
- Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
- 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.
- I have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. You are my sympathy, my best self, my angel. I am bound to your heart with strong affection. 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.
- If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
- I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.
- I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. My soul is not necessary to purchase 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.
- Reader, I married him.
- Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.
- 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.
- 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 revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.
- Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.
- All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.
- The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter – in the eye.
- I have little left in myself – I must have you. The world may laugh, may call me stupid, selfish – but that does not mean it. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.
- I ask you to pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
- I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near me, as now: 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. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, – you’d forget me. Mr. Rochester had read my thoughts unspoken times with an insight to me incomprehensible. In this instance, he did not notice my sudden vocal response. But he smiled at my face with a smile he had of himself and which he only used on rare occasions. He seemed to think too good for common purpose: it was the real sunshine of feeling-he shed it over me now.” You are strong and green, sir. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.” YouHave a preference for the look of another planet. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.” “I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,-a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless. Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.”I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade – the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem.”I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance to my heart.”