“I know that there is not in the world a more subtle poison than that which is extracted from and administered by books.”

“She turned of an ashy paleness as cold hatred and desire for revenge took possession of her vindictive soul.”

“Secrets are like flowers buried under snow. Eventually they rise up and push through into the light.”

“That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.”

“I found Burns, absorbed, silent, abstracted from all around her by the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of the embers.”

“Oh, that fear of his self-abandonment—far worse than my abandonment—how it goaded me! It was a barbed arrow-head in my breast; it tore me when I tried to extract it; it sickened me when remembrance thrust it farther in.”

“I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.”