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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #charlotte
Its time we woke up,” pursued Gerald, still inwardly urged to unfamiliar speech. “Women are pretty much people, seems to me. I know they dress like fools - but who’s to blame for that? We invent all those idiotic hats of theirs, and design their crazy fashions, and what’s more, if a woman is courageous enough to wear common-sense clothes - and shoes - which of us wants to dance with her? ↗
Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you! ↗
As I said, you have mistaken me for another. London is full of drab little peahens, sir. Now, then, I’m leaving,” she said in a huff. “To change?” he asked, unable to stop from goading her. “To write a poem for my toast,” she snapped. “And you may suffer, for I will not help you with yours.” “No need, darling,” Matthew drawled, his words intending to push her away. “I doubt you know a suitable word that will rhyme with fuck. ” “Stuck,” she said, turning to face him. “For two days, my lord. We are stuck with one another. Let us make the best of it.” “And how do you propose we do that?” “By giving each other wide berth. We will not stand together, we will not talk to one another and we will most certainly not look at one another.” “No problem from this quarter.” “Good. You may be assured that it will be no difficulty for me, either.” -Matthew and Jane ↗
We’ve grown and changed, screwed up, but at the beginning of each summer, we found each other again. Or maybe we never really lost each other. ↗
If she died as a result of this journey, it wouldn't be because of slavers. It would be because Richard's inability to communicate would give her a heart attack. ↗
Am I to die?” I asked, and he stopped, raised our joined hands to his mouth and gently kissed my knuckles. “You are, my love, and in your sleep, you will become Death’s bride. ↗
She was beautiful and radiant. He remembered the concern in her eyes. The same concern drove her now, pushing her toward acts of violence. On the surface, he'd be a fool to turn her down. She was driven by tragedy, just like him, and she would be incorruptible, just like him. He needed a blade to kill, but she could kill dozens at once empty-handed. She was Death, and she had just asked to be his ally. ↗
Everywhere you are, I will be. Everywhere you go, I will go. I will follow you into your dreams, stay while you sleep, watch while you eat.” That sinful bottom lip touched hers, then played with it, brushing it, tugging on it, parting her mouth as if he had all the time in the world to play and coax. “I will be the very air you breathe. ↗
Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit. But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. ‘I have often thought’, he said to himself, ‘that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.’ He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep. He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works… It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. Mr Corbett soon found that he too was ‘off reading’. Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality. This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bellwether, isolated from the flock. ↗
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