{
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  "site": {
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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/charlotte-bronte/villette/i-told-him",
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  "id": "f466a499-a344-4382-9a71-06398bb3ad28",
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  "text": "I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax- lights and embroidery, at such times and under such circumstances as should be devoted to lifting the secret vision to Him whose home is Infinity, and His being — Eternity. That when I thought of sin and sorrow, of earthly corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe — I could not care for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when the pains of existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before me — when the mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in view — _then_, even the scientific strain, or the prayer in a language learned and dead, harassed: with hindrance a heart which only longed to cry — \"God be merciful to me, a sinner!\"",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Charlotte Brontë",
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  "book": {
    "title": "Villette",
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  "topics": [
    {
      "name": "religion",
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      "name": "prayer",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:42",
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      "id": "dca2035d-e1c6-43da-803e-e25ee4d3f46e",
      "slug": "there-is-in-lovers",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/charlotte-bronte/villette/there-is-in-lovers",
      "text": "There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.",
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      "character": null,
      "chapter": null,
      "chapter_parent": null,
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          "name": "selfishness",
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          "name": "falling in love",
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      "slug": "liberty-lends-us-her",
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      "text": "Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.",
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      "topics": [
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          "name": "freedom",
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          "name": "hope",
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      "source": {
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      "slug": "if-there-are",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/charlotte-bronte/villette/if-there-are",
      "text": "If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.",
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