I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
Catalog
Book
Jane Eyre
Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates • Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyreerupted onto the Engl
Characters
He made me love him without looking at me.
Strange energy was in his voice; strange fire in his look.
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.
...human beings must love something...
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.
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.
You are human and fallible.
When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should - so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.
The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.
Beauty is in the eye of the gazer.
I loved him very much - more than I could trust myself to say - more than words had power to express.
It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer.
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.
He was the first to recognize me, and to love what he saw.
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.
I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.
I would always rather be happy than dignified.
I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.