Charlotte Brontë - Shirley (1849)

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That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.

Charlotte Brontë

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed....

Charlotte Brontë

If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.

Charlotte Brontë

There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil — improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?" "Are you a young lady?" "I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.

Charlotte Brontë

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.

Charlotte Brontë

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

Charlotte Brontë

For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity.

Charlotte Brontë

I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand - they only. Know this at last.

Charlotte Brontë

Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?

Charlotte Brontë

God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.

Charlotte Brontë

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

Charlotte Brontë

Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.

Charlotte Brontë

This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day; that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring.

Charlotte Brontë

I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

Charlotte Brontë

Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being's eye has failed to greet mine.

Charlotte Brontë

Nervous alarms should always be communicated, that they may be dissipated.

Charlotte Brontë

Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.

Charlotte Brontë

Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.

Charlotte Brontë

In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life—November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.

Charlotte Brontë

I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me.

Charlotte Brontë

At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,—inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.

Charlotte Brontë

They will both be happy, and I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery: some of my suffering is very acute. Truly, I ought not to have been born: they should have smothered me at first cry.

Charlotte Brontë

Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.

Charlotte Brontë

I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

Charlotte Brontë