A beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance.

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.

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

Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.

Because when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester's breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart - have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face, or better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.