"Success is terrifying. Like happiness, it is often appreciated in retrospect. It's only later that you place it in perspective. Years from now, I'll look back and say, "God, wasn't it wonderful?""

"Life is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocius."

"The man needs to learn how to controll his anger, he is crossing a border here, and he has no right"

"Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?"

"[Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue."

"...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air."

"The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly."

"A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice."

"A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light."

"The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn."

"[Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened."

"They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats."

"Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?"

"You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?"

"[Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter."

"It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience."

"[Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank."

"When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me."

"[Tom had] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart."

"[Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life."

"But sir, certainly, there isn't any proof as to my guilt..."

"But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments."

"I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it."

"I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school."

"...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left."

"Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained."

"The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar."

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex."

"Comparing Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, as people tend to do, Virginia Woolf had this to say: "The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other.... [Charlotte Brontë] does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, which is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, "I love," "I hate," "I suffer"...She goes on to state that Emily Brontë is a greater poet than Charlotte because "there is no 'I' in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but not the love of men and women." In short, and here I would agree with her, Wuthering Heights is mythic."

"At all events, except for her writings on her mother, Colette is a less reliable source on the lesbian continuum than, I would think, Charlotte Brontë, who understood that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors, and comforters in the female struggle for survival, there is quite extraneous delight in each other's company and attraction to each others' minds and character, which attend a recognition of each others' strengths."

"Like Thackeray's daughters, I read Jane Eyre in childhood, carried away "as by a whirlwind." Returning to Charlotte Brontë's most famous novel, as I did over and over in adolescence, in my twenties, thirties, now in my forties, I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator's imagination, some nourishment I needed then and still need today."

"(What attracted you to the character of Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and made you use her for the basis of Wide Sargasso Sea?) RHYS: I had always wanted to write about her... I was annoyed about the poor lunatic West Indian, she's not a true character at all, unlike Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, so I wrote her life. Jane and Mr Rochester come completely to life in Jane Eyre, she doesn't, she's just such a horrible character."

"I like Brontë. Not just Jane Eyre, but Villette is a wonderful novel. And Shirley is interesting too."

"As our President said, we have in our army such minds as Spencer, and Mill, and I would add Buckle, and many others; and they are diffusing light, intelligence and civilization, and advocating the right. We have women also. We have Frances Cobbe; whose name I speak with pride and rejoicing; and in the literary world we have Charlotte Bronte, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and many others, who are consecrating their talents to the great cause of womanhood, and freedom, and right."

"You know that when the work entitled "Jane Eyre" appeared, with a fictitious name, it was said to be a work of too great power for any woman-that it must have been written by a man. It proved, however, to have been written by a woman."

"Jane Eyre was the book that made me want to write."

"Feminists are in love with Charlotte Brontë. Yet the great summation of the travails of Charlotte's Jane Eyre was: "Reader, I married him." Reader, I married the boss. No, listen, that's just not good enough! Charlotte Brontë was a flaming racist. If you want to know where she stands, compare her with her sister, the antiracist Emily Brontë, who said, "I am Heathcliff": I am that man of color, who had been a street urchin. And that's just the beginning of what I think we have to do, not only if we are white, but whoever we are. We have to identify entirely with those with less power than ourselves: not only are we "with them"; we are "them." That way lies power for all of us, the end of the divisions, the end of the hierarchy and the flowering of real diversity and individuality."

"When I was fourteen I used to read literature in English. I read textbooks and the newspapers in Spanish, but when I really started to get into literature was when I started reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights."

"Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves."

"Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable."

"Better to be without logic than without feeling."

"I tell you, Mr. Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own soul, by denying their existence."

"Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another’s rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever."

"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life."

"My God, whose son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest, thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise, and in Him is my trust, and though stripped and crushed by thee, -though naked, desolate, void of resource- I do not despair:where the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray: Jehovah, in His own time, will aid."

"What animal magnetism drew thee and me together—I know not."

"There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may."