You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read. - Charlotte Brontë

A strong, vague persuasion that it was better to go forward than backward, and that I could go forward — that a way, however narrow and difficult, would in time open — predominated over other feelings: its influence hushed them so far, that at last I became sufficiently tranquil to be able to say my prayers and seek my couch. I had just extinguished my candle and lain down, when a deep, low, mighty tone swung through the night. At first I knew it not; but it was uttered twelve times, and at the twelfth colossal hum and trembling knell, I said: “I lie in the shadow of St. Paul’s.

It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.