Charlotte Brontë Quotes

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.

I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.

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

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily
Enjoy them as they fly!

The idea of marrying a doll or a fool was always abhorrent to me. I know that a pretty doll, a fair fool, might do well enough for the honeymoon; but when passion cooled, how dreadful to find a lump of wax and wood laid in my bossom, a half-idiot clasped in my arms, and to remember that I had made of this my equal - nay, my idol - to know that I must pass the rest of my dreary life with a creature incapable of understanding what I said, of appreciating what I thought, or of sympathising with what I felt!

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.