Emily Bronté
"Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"Honest people don't hide their deeds."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing them."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"I have to remind myself to breath -- almost to remind my heart to beat!"
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
"Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies."
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.”
-Emily Bronté
“Kiss me again, but don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer--but yours! How can I?”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine, connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least – for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object, by day I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men, and women – my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“The thing that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. I'm tired, tired of being enclosed here. I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart, but really with it, and in it.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! how can I bear it?" was the first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair. And now he stared at her so earnestly that I thought the very intensity of his gaze would bring tears into his eyes; but they burned with anguish: they did not melt.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable."
"Because you are not fit to go there," I answered. "All sinners would be miserable in heaven.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be — that proves I love him better than myself.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”
-Emily Bronté
“Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catherine! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing on my lips.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“How cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“By this curious turn of disposition I have gained the reputation of deliberate heartlessness; how undeserved, I alone can appreciate.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“She was a wild, wicked slip of a girl. She burned too brightly for this world.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“They forgot everything the minute they were together again.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing,’ she muttered.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!”
-Emily Bronté
“And there you see the distinction between our feelings: had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him. You may look incredulous, if you please! I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drank his blood! But, till then - if you don't believe me, you don't know me - til then, I would have died by inches before I touched a single hair on his head!”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“I 'never told my love' vocally; still, if looks have language, the merest idiot might have guessed I was over head and ears;”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
“Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever; your veins are full of ice water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”
-Emily Bronté, Wuthering Heights
