Favorite quotes from Jane Eyre

I love this book. One of those books I would have skimmed in high school English but as an adult will read again and again. One of those books that embodies David Foster Wallace’s observation “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

On appreciation of the natural world

The novel is a story of human life, yet at interludes Jane turns her attention, and the reader’s attention, to the natural world in a spirit of awe. The pace of the novel mirrors the way my own focus dials up and down through space and time, from the task at hand to the beauty of the tree outside.

I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement; the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn … to that sky expanded before me,–a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill-tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance; and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth; the clock struck in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went in.

On the power of physical beauty

Our brains process the human form subconsciously. Visual stimulation directly evokes strong emotions without need for explanation… yet how artfully Charlotte transmutes this experience to the written word, through the page, through time:

Had he been a statue instead of a man, he could not have been easier. He was young– perhaps from twenty-eight to thirty–tall, slender; his face riveted the eye; it was like a Greek face, very pure in outline: quite a straight, classic nose; quite an Athenian mouth and chin. It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes so near the antique models as did his. He might well be a little shocked at the irregularity of my lineaments, his own being so harmonious.

No charm was wanting, no defect was perceptible; the young girl had regular and delicate lineaments; eyes shaped and coloured as we see them in lovely pictures, large, and dark, and full; the long and shadowy eyelash which encircles a fine eye with so soft a fascination; the pencilled brow which gives such clearness; the white smooth forehead, which adds such repose to the livelier beauties of tint and ray; the cheek oval, fresh, and smooth; the lips, fresh too, ruddy, healthy, sweetly formed; the even and gleaming teeth without flaw; the small dimpled chin; the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses–all advantages, in short, which, combined, realise the ideal of beauty, were fully hers. I wondered, as I looked at this fair creature: I admired her with my whole heart.

On attraction beyond physical beauty

Mr. Rochester and Jane are both famously unattractive. Their love is forged in other ways.

I am sure most people would have thought him an ugly man; yet there was so much unconscious pride in his port; so much ease in his demeanour; such a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance; so haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness, that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference, and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.

Most true is it that “beauty is in the eye of the gazer.” My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth,–all energy, decision, will,–were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me,–that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his.

On “all is fair in love and war”

The many-layered deceit involved in Mr Rochester’s courtship of Jane irks me: his hiding of Bertha, his feigning interest in other women, his dressing up as a fortune teller. And yet in the end… it worked. Jane forgives it all. The book does not shy away from the undercurrents of impropriety that fuel many of our strongest romantic connections.

Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to render you as madly in love with me as I was with you; and I knew jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance of that end.

On the nature of human consciousness

Our cognition is borne of a particular biological substrate – this is reflected in our input and output channels as well as our emotional reward systems. Jane has such prescient recognition of the nature of mind, a century before science fiction came on the scene to explore these ideas further:

What a still, hot, perfect day! What a golden desert this spreading moor! Everywhere sunshine. I wished I could live in it and on it. I saw a lizard run over the crag; I saw a bee busy among the sweet bilberries. I would fain at the moment have become bee or lizard, that I might have found fitting nutriment, permanent shelter here. But I was a human being, and had a human being’s wants: I must not linger where there was nothing to supply them. I rose; I looked back at the bed I had left. Hopeless of the future, I wished but this—that my Maker had that night thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness. Life, however, was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried; the want provided for; the suffering endured; the responsibility fulfilled. I set out.

We were born to strive and endure – you as well as I: do so.

On the subtler pleasures of socialization

This quote speaks to me as an introvert who finds comfort in socializing in unselfconscious community. And also as someone whose past reverberates in my dreams.

To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like ‘sitting sunshine, calm and sweet’; serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray… and yet… I used to rush into strange dreams at night… I still again and again met Mr Rochester.

On masculine and feminine polarity

Jane is feminine yet strong-willed. There is a tension within her between independence and submission. She calls her lover her “master”, and she’s naturally drawn to his command:

Mr. Rochester had such a direct way of giving orders, it seemed a matter of course to obey him promptly.

And this inclination reveals itself in relation to her cousin Diana as well:

It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers, and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will.

I find many modern women (and some men) navigate the same duality.

As a window into earlier iteration of human society

What has changed? The outward markers of social class, the prominence of religion, the freedoms afforded to women. What has not? Sharp divisions between classes, our experience of beauty in others and the natural world, the mistreatment of mentally ill, power dynamics in social relationships, what it’s like to be alive.

As innovation

We have to be told how to appreciate some art from the past: it was innovative at the time, but doesn’t seem particularly special to modern eyes because it’s been copied so much. Seinfeld comes to mind. But this novel needs no such qualification. It’s strikingly original and resonant nearly 200 years after publication.