Literary Birthday – 21 April – Charlotte Brontë

12 Quotes

1. Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.
2. I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.
3. I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.
4. No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
5. A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
6. It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
7. I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
8. I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
9. The standard heroes and heroines of novels, are personages in whom I could never, from childhood upwards, take an interest, believe to be natural, or wish to imitate: were I obliged to copy these characters, I would simply — not write at all. Were I obliged to copy any former novelist, even the greatest, even Scott, in anything , I would not write — Unless I have something of my own to say, and a way of my own to say it in, I have no business to publish; unless I can look beyond the greatest Masters, and study Nature herself, I have no right to paint; unless I can have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent.
10. I would always rather be happy than dignified.
11. I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.
12. Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three surviving Brontë sisters. She wrote Jane Eyre under the pen name Currer Bell. Follow this link to find out where the famous Bronte sisters wrote. Her sisters were Anne Brontë and Emily Brontë.

Source for image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CBRichmond.png

by Amanda Patterson

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