Betty

“Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?” Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: A Guide to Reading and Reflecting

“one man may insult fifty—it is the privilege of weakness.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“There fermented in that sublimated brain plans so vast, projects so tumultuous, that there remained no room for any capricious or material love—that sentiment which is fed by leisure and grows with corruption.”
― Alexandre Dumas, Alexandre Dumas Collection: The Three Musketeers, Ten Years Later, the Man in the Iron Mask, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots

“If a man has tortured and killed your father, your mother, your sweetheart, in short, one of those beings who leave an eternal emptiness and a perpetually bleeding wound when they are torn from your heart, do you think society has given you sufficient reparation because the blade of the guillotine has passed between the murderer's trapezius and his occipital bone, because the who made you undergo long years of mental and emotional suffering has undergone a few seconds of physical pain?”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo