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Jane Eyre Quotes
Quotes from Jane Eyre organised into themes
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Jane’s Early Life - Indications that she originates from an upper-class family- Pg 7 - ‘(Mrs Reed, when there was no company, dined early)’
- Jane starts out in an upper class environment she knows the difference, could
this be why she is accepting of her lower class position in society
- Pg 11 ‘massive pillars of mahogany’
- Pg 14 - ‘Turning from Bessie (though her presence was far less obnoxious to me than
that of Abbot, for instance, would have been)’
- Pg 17 - ‘Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not
much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as
connected with ragged clothes, scanty clothes, fireless grate, rude manners, and
debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation’
- Pg 17 - ‘No; I should not like to belong to poor people’
- Pg 17 - ‘I could not see how poor people had the means of being kind’
- Pg 28 - ‘not so spacious as the drawing-room at Gateshead, but comfortable enough’
- Pg 33 - ‘wondered within myself whether every day’s fare would be like this’ - Evidence
of an upper class upbringing, she took food for granted. With Aunt reed her surroundings
were upper class but her treatment was lower class.
- Pg 33 - ‘I should have been glad of as much more- I was still hungry’
- Pg 34 - ‘How small my portion seemed!’
- Pg 39 - ‘an irksome struggle with difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and
unwonted tasks’
- Pg 39 - ‘Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe cold’
- Pg 59 - ‘you are genteel enough; you look like a lady’
- Pg 59 - ‘Oh, you are quite a lady, Miss Jane’
Upper class Life
- Pg 62 - ‘they are only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality’ -
Mrs Fairfax
- Pg 75 - ‘always dress for the evening when Mr Rochester is here’
- Pg 83 - ‘purple curtains hung rich and ample before the lofty window’
- Pg 98 - ‘Bessie Leaven had said I was quite a lady; and she spoke truth- I was a lady’
- Pg 267 - ‘I told you I was independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress’
Outsider
- Pg 7 - ‘clustered round their mama’ - isolated at an early age
- Pg 7 - ‘Me, she had dispensed from joining the group’
- Pg 9 - ‘not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us’
- Pg 10 - ‘it is your place to be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them’
- Pg 11 - ‘Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish, was respected’
- Pg 11 - ‘Georgina, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid sprite, a captious and insolent
carriage, was universally indulged’
- Pg 11 - ‘John no one thwarted, much less punished’
,- Pg 18 - ‘that my mother had married him against the wishes of her friends, who
considered the match beneath her’
- Pg 19 - ‘from every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded’
- Treated as lower class in an upper class household
- Pg 19 - ‘I told you not to go near her; she is not worthy of notice; I do not chose that
wither you or your sisters should associate with her’... ‘they are not fit to associate with
me’
- Pg 20 - ‘Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of
affection’
- Pg 21 - ‘none ever brought visitors in whom I was interested’
- Pg 26 - ‘a little roving solitary thing’
- Pg 31 - ‘that feeling of isolation I was accustomed’
- Pg 43 - ‘This girl, who might be one of God’s own lambs, is a little castaway: not a
member of the true flock, but evidently an interloper and an alien’
- Pg 43 - ‘you must shun her’
- Pg 44 - ‘I abandoned myself, and my tears watered the boards.’
- Pg 44 - ‘I cannot bear to be solitary and hated’
- Pg 51 - ‘We had, as usual, separated ourselves from the others’
- Pg 56 - ‘I have no friends’
- Pg 60 - ‘Inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every
connection’
- Pg 62 - ‘they are only servants, and one can’t converse with them on terms of equality’ -
Mrs Fairfax
- Pg 69 - ‘safe in the silence and solitude of the spot’
- Pg 70 - ‘my road was lonely’
- Pg 73 - ‘to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely
little room’
- Pg 103 - ‘Doesn’t she know? [...] the conversation was of course dropped’
- Pg 103 - ‘I was purposefully excluded’
- Pg 121 - ‘lived as a solitary dependent in a great house’
- Pg 123 - ‘I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do’
- Pg 155 - ‘Do you think because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and
heartless?’
- Pg 156 - ‘Me who have not a friend in the world but you- if you are my friend: not a
shilling but what you have given me?’
- Pg 181 - ‘Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman- almost a bride, was a
cold, solitary girl again’
- Pg 181 - ‘long as I had been shut up here, no message had been sent to ask how I was,
or to invite me to come down’
- Pg 182 - ‘you shut yourself up and grieve alone!’
- Pg 196 - ‘Nature seemed to me benign and good; I thought she loved me, outcast as I
was’ - Although Jane has been alienated from society she finds comfort in the fact that
nature still accepts her. She continues to be protected by God?
- Pg 183 - ‘there is neither room nor claim for me sir’
, - Pg 183 - ‘you have as good as said that I am a married man - as a married man you will
shun me’
- Pg 184 - ‘I’ll shut up Thornfield Hall: I’ll nail up the front door and board the lower
windows’
- Pg 184 - ‘You are to share my solitude. Do you understand? I shook my head’
- Pg 185 - ‘must leave Adèle and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must
begin a new existence’
- Pg 187 - ‘in the eyes of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour’
- Pg 188 - ‘there is not known what a sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is
bound to you’ - book context: hope/ god talking to rochester and telling him to move to
england.
- Pg 188 - ‘confine her with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield’
- Pg 188 - ‘shelter her degradation with secrecy and leave her’
- Pg 193 - ‘care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I
am, the mire I will respect myself’
- Pg 193 - ‘you are leaving me? Yes’
- Pg 195 - ‘I longed to be his; I panted to return’
- Pg 200 - ‘shall i be an outcast again this night?’
- Pg 206 - ‘poor, emaciated, palid wanderer?’
- Pg 210 - ‘Not a tie links me to any living thing: not a claim do I possess to admittance
under any roof in England’
- Pg 220 - ‘I had nothing- I was an outcast, a beggar, a vagrant’
- Pg 236 - ‘Glorious discovery to a lonely wretch!’
- Pg 237 - ‘cannot imagine at all the craving I have for fraternal and sisterly love. I never
had a home, I never had brothers of sisters; I must and will have them now’
- Pg 267 - ‘I told you I was independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress’
Indications of a lower class background
- Pg 9 - ‘You are dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none;
you ought to beg, and to not live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the
same meals that we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense’ - said by John Reed
- Pg 10 - ‘to strike a young gentleman, your benefacteress’s son!’
- Pg 10 - ‘if she were to turn you off, you would have to go to the poorhouse’
- Pg 10 - ‘they will have a great deal of money and you will have none: it is your place to
be humble, and to try to make yourself agreeable to them’
- Pg 13 - ‘you will now stay an hour longer, and it is only on condition of perfect
submission and stillness that I shall liberate you’
- Pg 15 - ‘accustomed as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging’
- Pg 18 - ‘my father had been a poor clergyman; that my mother had married him against
the wishes of her friends, who considered the match beneath her’
- Pg 18 - ‘typhus fever’ ‘both died within a month of each other’
- Pg 20 - ‘Bessie now frequently employed me as a sort of under-nurserymaid, to tidy the
room, dust the chairs, &c.’
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