We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.
I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.
Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.
I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.
If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women.
Whenever you see a board up with "Trespassers will be prosecuted," trespass at once.
They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers.
Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.
If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.
Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?
Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.
I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.
I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.
This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.
The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life - the number of children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself, whether she had help bringing up her family, if she had servants, whether part of the housework was her task - it is only when we can measure the way of life and experience made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.
Life stand still here.
Nothing could be slow enough, nothing lasts too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank. Many a time had she gone, at Barton when they were all talking, to look at the sky; seen it between peoples shoulders at dinner; seen it in London when she could not sleep. She walked to the window.
It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: