Anne Brontë

It is never too late to reform, as long as you have the sense to desire it, and the strength to execute your purpose.

You might as well sell yourself to slavery at once, as marry man you dislike.

What the world stigmatizes as romantic, is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed; for, if the generous ideas of youth are too often over-clouded by the sordid views of after-life, that scarcely proves them to be false.

A burst of passion is a fine rousing thing upon occasion, Helen, and a flood of tears is marvellously affecting, but, when indulged too often, they are both deuced plaguy things for spoiling one's beauty and tiring out one's friends.

I know not whether, at the time, it was not for him rather than myself that I blushed; for, since he and I are one, I so identify myself with him, that I feel his degradation, his failings, and transgressions as my own; I blush for him, I fear for him; I repent for him, weep, pray, and feel for him as for myself; but I cannot act for him; and hence, I must be and I am, debased, contaminated by the union, both in my own eyes, and in the actual truth.

The demon of drink was as black as the demon of play, and nearly as hard to get rid of — especially as his kind friends did all they could to second the promptings of his own insatiable cravings.

Whatever my husband's faults may be, it can only aggravate the evil for me to hear them from a stranger's lips.

How odd it is that we so often weep for each other’s distresses, when we shed not a tear for our own!

He knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold his light, he would have my sky to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.

A hardness such as this is taught by rough experience and despair alone.

You will form a very inadequate estimate of a man's character, if you judge by what a fond sister says of him. The worst of them generally know how to hide their misdeeds from their sisters' eyes, and their mother's, too.

It is a woman's nature to be constant — to love one and one only, blindly, tenderly, and for ever.