Book//mark – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall | Anne Brontë, 1848
A sketch of Anne Brontë by her sister Charlotte,1834 Title-page of the first edition, 1848
“Smiles and tears are so alike with me, they are neither of them confined to any
particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.”
“I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys
its own moral to those who are able to receive it.”
“His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up
and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.”
“He knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold the light, he would have my sky
to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.”
“There is such a thing as looking through a person’s eyes into the heart, and learning more
of the height, and breadth, and depth of another’s soul in one hour than it might take you a
lifetime to discover, if he or she were not disposed to reveal it, or if you had not the sense
to understand it.”
“I hate talking where there is no exchange of ideas or sentiments,
and no good given or received”
“I would rather have your friendship than the love
of any other woman in the world.”
“Keep a guard over your eyes and ears as the inlets of your heart, and over your lips as
the outlet, lest they betray you in a moment of unwariness. […]
First study; then approve; then love.”
“My heart is too thoroughly dried to be broken in a hurry,
and I mean to live as long as I can.”
“You may think it all very fine, Mr. Huntingdon, to amuse yourself with rousing my
jealousy; but take care you don’t rouse my hate instead. And when you have once
extinguished my love, you will find it no easy matter to kindle it again.”
“Increase of love brings increase of happiness,
when it is mutual, and pure as that will be.”
“Ιf she were more perfect, she would be less interesting.”
“If I hate the sins, I love the sinner, and would do much for his salvation”
“My nature was not originally calm,’ said I. ‘I have learned to appear
so by dint of hard lessons and many repeated efforts.”
“If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt
to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them – not insist upon
leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone.”
“No one can be happy in eternal solitude.”
“If we can only speak to slander our betters, let us hold our tongues.”
“I possess the faculty of enjoying the company of those I – of my friends as well
in silence as in conversation.”
“there is always a but in this imperfect world!”
“This rose is not so fragrant as a summer flower, but it has stood through hardships none
of them could bear: the cold rain of winter has sufficed to nourish it, and its faint sun to
warm it; the bleak winds have not blanched it, or broken its stem, and the keen frost has
not blighted it. Look, Gilbert, it is still fresh and blooming as a flower can be, with the
cold snow even now on its petals. Will you have it?”
“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied
to the truth than is commonly supposed.”
“I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice—drone, drone, drone, in my ear—while
he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the
notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas
upon me and reforming my errors of judgment, or perhaps that he was talking down to
my level, and amusing me with entertaining discourse. Yet he was a decent man enough
in the main, I daresay; and if he had kept his distance, I never would have hated him.”
“Cupid’s arrows not only had been too sharp for me, but they were barbed and
deeply rooted, and I had not yet been able to wrench them from my heart.”
