I could bend you with my finger and my thumb. A mere reed you feel in my hands. But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your… - Charlotte Brontë

For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Mr. Rochester continued to be blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near — that knit us so very close; for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature — he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of the field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam — of the landscape before us; of the weather around us — and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad — because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.