“All looked colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality; and that strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit; I thought it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp” (71)

“had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child – though equally dependent and friendless – Mrs. Reed would have endured my presence more complacently; her children would have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellow-feeling; the servants would have been less prone to make me the scape-goat of the nursery” (73)

“Children can feel, but they cannot analyze their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words” (81)

“That proves you have a wicked heart; and you must pray to God to change it; to give you a new and clean one: to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (92)

“I hardly know where I found the hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger; the step was contrary to my nature and habits; but I think her occupation touched a cord of sympathy somewhere; for I too liked reading, though of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial” (110)

“I found the mess to consist of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and cooked together” (112)

“it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that [women] ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex” (178)

“[Grace] was intent on her work, in which her whole thoughts seemed absorbed: on her hard forehead, and in her common-place features, was nothing either of the paleness or desperation one would have expected to see marking the countenance of a woman who attempted murder; and whose intended victim had followed her last night to her lair, and (as I believed) charged her with the crime she wished to perpetrate” (229)

“Be sure that is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him: so don’t make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures, agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order: keep to your caste; and be too self-respecting to lavish the love of the whole heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and would be despised” (239)

“For the Victorians the governess was a profoundly ambivalent figure, and Bronte’s text cannot help but produce and re-produce those ambivalences” (24)

“the highest qualification a governess could bring to the job was the fact that she was a ‘lady'” (25)