Browse quotations by Emily Brontë with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Focused collections bring together quotations from this author around one recurring idea.
“She would sing while I was weeping; If I listened, she would cease.”
The unstable personified Hope seems available only at a distance, intensifying the poem’s portrait of encouragement that disappears when directly sought.
Source note: “Hope,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The line is part of a deliberately bleak personification and should not be misread as simple positive-thinking advice.
“Hope Was but a timid friend; She sat without the grated den, Watching how my fate would tend.”
Hope is personified as present but unreliable, capturing the frustration of wanting encouragement while feeling that it remains outside the speaker’s confinement.
Source note: “Hope,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; Project Gutenberg #1019. The poem personifies Hope critically rather than offering a straightforward optimistic slogan.
“Love is like the wild rose-briar; Friendship like the holly-tree.”
Wild rose and holly become contrasting natural images for two kinds of attachment, setting up the poem’s question about beauty, season and constancy.
Source note: “Love and Friendship,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The comparison is a poetic metaphor, not a claim that friendship and romantic love always follow one fixed pattern.
“The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms, But which will bloom most constantly?”
The seasonal contrast asks whether the less showy bond may prove more constant once the most visibly attractive season has passed.
Source note: “Love and Friendship,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The question belongs to the poem’s rose-and-holly metaphor for love and friendship.
“Other desires and other hopes beset me, Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!”
New desires and hopes can enter life without necessarily betraying the person who is remembered, allowing continuation and fidelity to coexist.
Source note: “Remembrance,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The speaker is negotiating loyalty to a lost beloved rather than announcing a universal timetable for moving on.
“Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers After such years of change and suffering!”
Remembering after long change and suffering is presented as a form of fidelity, showing that grief can alter across time without making the earlier bond unreal.
Source note: “Remembrance,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The poem’s speaker is reflecting on a long-dead beloved within a literary lyric.
“Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers, From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”
The poem measures bereavement through fifteen winters turning into spring, making seasonal change a visible clock for grief that has lasted across years.
Source note: “Remembrance,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846); Project Gutenberg #1019. The line belongs to a dramatic lyric voice and is not biographical evidence by itself.
“Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.”
The speaker describes learning to sustain life after joy itself no longer provides the support it once did, making adaptation an explicit result of suffering.
Source note: “Remembrance,” Project Gutenberg #1019. The line follows the collapse of earlier dreams and is literary reflection on endurance, not a prescription to avoid joy or support.
“In life and death a chainless soul, With courage to endure.”
The closing wish joins freedom with endurance, defining courage not as control over events but as keeping the soul unchained through them.
Source note: “The Old Stoic,” Project Gutenberg #1019. This is the poem’s closing aspiration and remains a literary statement rather than medical or psychological guidance.
“Riches I hold in light esteem, And Love I laugh to scorn; And lust of fame was but a dream, That vanished with the morn.”
The speaker strips wealth, romantic attachment and fame of ultimate authority in order to define freedom through an inwardly independent stance.
Source note: “The Old Stoic,” in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; Project Gutenberg #1019. The poem uses a deliberately severe persona and should not be treated as a complete ethical system.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
The line describes intimacy as profound likeness rather than surface compatibility, making identity and attachment almost inseparable in the speaker’s imagination.
Source note: Wuthering Heights; Catherine explains the depth and identity-level nature of her attachment to Heathcliff.