⟡ Amira ⟡

“Never,” said he, as he ground his teeth, “never was anything at once
so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!” (And he
shook me with the force of his hold.) “I could bend her with my finger
and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed
her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking
out of it, defying me, with more than courage—with a stern triumph.
Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it—the savage, beautiful
creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the
captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would
escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwellingplace.
And it is you, spirit—with will and energy, and virtue and purity—
that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself you could
come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized
against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence—you will vanish
ere I inhale your fragrance.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Good-night, my-" He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you - you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for eighty years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that like the sound of Jem's violin, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess