“Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and the dungeons are of the spirit, the dungeons especially; and sometimes when Emily reads out in her low, almost guttural voice Charlotte wants to run but can’t think why or where she would run to.”

“...soon dinner will run into bed-time, and we shall all eat reclining like the ancient Romans--about whose digestion, you know, I have often wondered. Whether a dose of rhubabrb might have made a difference to Nero or Caligula is a question you might ponder, my dear, next time you go through your Tacitus.”

“Anne’s is a world very like this one, and you can move about in it with familiarity - but not freedom: it is a place of rigorous consequence, where the weak have to give way to the strong, where her governess heroine Agnes must walk as best she can in the cold shade of money and masculinity.”

“She simply cannot let go of love- and who can blame that? Is it not the hardest thing in the world to relinquish, once you have it?”

“If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.”

“She sincerely wishes success, for her new life, and intends that no failure of effort, temper, or spirits on her part will jeopardise it.”

“I have been run over by the speeding chariot of fate, caught up in its spiked wheels." - "I hate it when that happens," said Stephen.”