Jane

“I do not say that I shall succeed but I shall try to succeed—the effort alone will do me good—I fear nothing so much as idleness—lack of employment—inertia—lethargy of the faculties—when the body is idle, the spirit suffers cruelly.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Selected Letters

“There have been times I cannot hide,
There have been times when this was drear,
When my sad soul forgot its pride
And longed for one to love me here.

But those were in the early glow
Of feelings since subdued by care;
And they have died so long ago,
I hardly now believe they were.

First melted off the hope of youth,
Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;
And then experience told me truth
In mortal bosoms never grew.

’Twas grief enough to think mankind
All hollow, servile, insincere;
But worse to trust to my own mind
And find the same corruption there.”
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems

“I am pleased that you are so fully convinced of my candour, for to know that you suspected me of a deficiency in this virtue would grieve and mortify me beyond expression. I do not derive any merit from the possession of it, for in me it is constitutional. Yet I think where it is possessed it will rarely exist alone, and where it is wanted there is reason to doubt the existence of almost every other virtue.”
― Muriel Spark, The Essence of the Brontës: A compilation with essays

“And through it all, behind my daydream, I’ll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world’s darkness.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet