I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,–and to speak.
Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
Jane Eyre “I desired more…than was within my reach. Who blames me? Many call me discontented. I couldn’t help it: the restlessness is in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
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.
Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.
There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.
Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before ‘the writing on the wall’ and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world – the … affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.
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.
