It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all 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, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

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

All these relics gave... Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.

Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!

To the dear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break... I am ever tender and true.

After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you.

Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.