Charlotte Bronte Quotes

Jane Eyre, Chapter 17. Jane expresses her love for Rochester unreservedly and unashamedly. After his two-week absense, she can finally admit her love for him, having before now tried to talk herself out of it. It is also clear that what attracts her to him is not any physical beauty he possesses, which he doesn’t have, but what lies on the inside. Here is the fuller quote: “Most true is it that ‘beauty is in the eye of the gazer.’ My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, – all energy, decision, will, – were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me: they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, – that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him: the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”