Understanding a people's culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity...It renders them accessible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity.
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?
What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.
I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
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.
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 can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.
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.
You have not wept at all! I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but no trace of tears. I suppose then, your heart has been weeping blood?
Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.
Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs." - Helen Burns
it is madness in al 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 into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion...Appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines that only tend to elate and magnify few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ.
Spring drew on...and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
She bit me. She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her...She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart." Richard mason
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,--and to speak.
Look in his eyes. He has died a thousand times these last moments...You defeated him utterly the moment you saw fear in his eyes. All else is redundancy.
[S]ince the dawn of civilization, getting in-laws has been one of marriage's most important functions.
A simple creature unlettyrde. Julian of Norwich called herself. The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Echoed Jane Austen—four hundred years afterward.
In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.
Jane woke, stretched, and decided to kill herself. If she hadn’t found a reason to live by the end of the day she would jump from the rig. It felt good to have a plan.
