WUTHERING HEIGHTS - quotes
Heathcliff: “He seemed a sullen, patient child; hardened perhaps to ill-treatment: he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear”
Hindley: “His treatment of the latter (Heathcliff) was enough to make a fiend of a saint.”
“Hindley became tyrannical.He drove him(Heathcliff) from their company to the servants, insisted that he should labour out of doors. Heathcliff bore his deprivation pretty well at first.”
" Heathcliff and I are going to rebel - we took our initiatory step this evening"
When Catherine comes back from the Lintons: “I shall not stand to be laughed at. I shall not bear it.”
“The notion of envying Catherine was incomprehensible to him, but the notion of grieving her he understood clearly enough”.
Catherine to Linton: /when Heathcliff throws a dish of sauce when she comes back from the Lintons): “He was in bad temper, and now you've spoilt your visit; and he will be flogged: I hate him to be flogged.”
After Heathcliff was punished: “I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I'll wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do.”
Hindley, drunk, throws down the stairs his child, Hareton, and Heathcliff saves the child.
"I will be rich and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood,and I shall
be proud of having such a husband"
Catherine: “Here, and here! In whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I am wrong!”
“I've no business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven. And if that wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it; It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff; so he shall never know how I love him; and that , not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”
“He quite deserted! We separated! - she exclaimed with an accent of indignation - “Who is to separate us, pray! Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff......Nelly, you think me a selfish wretch, but did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? Whereas, if I marry Linton, , I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother's power”.
"My great miseries in the world have been Heathcliff's miseries...my great thought in living is himself!If all perished and he remained, I should still continue to be;and if all else remained ,and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.I should not seem a part of it.My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods :time will change it,I'm aware,as winter changes the trees.My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight,but necessary.Nelly,I am Heathcliff!He is always ,always in my mind not as a pleasure,any more than I am always a pleasure to myself,but as my own being."
Nelly: “One day, I had the misfortune, when she had provoked me exceedingly, to lay the blame of his disappearance on her: where indeed it belonged, as she well knew. From that period, for several months, she ceased to hold any communication with me.”
When Heathcliff returns: “Catherine flew upstairs, breathless and wild, too excited to show gladness: indeed, by her face, you would rather have surmised an awful calamity. “Oh, Edgar, Heathcliff's come back – he is!”
When Catherine tells Edgar to invite Heathcliff into the parlour: “ He looked vexed, and suggested the kitchen as a more suitable place for him. Mrs. Linton eyed him half angry, half laughing at his fastidiousness: No, I cannot sit in the kitchen. Set two tables here, Ellen, one for your master and Miss Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being of the lower orders”.
“He took a seat opposite Catherine, who kept her gaze fixed on him as if she feared he would vanish were she to remove it. He did not raise his to her often: a quick glance now and then sufficed; but I flashed back, each time more confidently, the undisguised delight he drank from hers. They were too much absorbed in their mutual joy to suffer embarassement. Not so Mr. Edgar: he grew pale with pure annoyance”
Catherine: “The event of this evening has reconciled me to God and humanity! I had risen in angry rebellion against Providence. Oh, I have endured very, very bitter misery, Nelly.”
Catherine to Isabella about Heathcliff: “He's not a rough diamond; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him “let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them; I say, “let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged” and he'd crush you like a sparrow's egg.' he'd be quite capable of marrying your fortune, avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. That's my picture: and I'm his friend.”
“What is it to you?” he growled, “I am not your husband: you needn't be jealous of me!”
“I am not jealous of you: “ replied the mistress, “ I'm jealous for you. But do you like her? Tell the truth, Heathcliff! There , you won't answer. I 'm certain you don't”
Heathcliff: “I seek no revenge on you. The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them. You are welcome to torture me to death to your amusement, only allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style. If I imagined you really wished me to marry Isabel, I'd cut my throat!”
Heathcliff for Edgar: “ But do you imagine that I shall leave Catherine to his duty and humanity and can you compare my feelings respecting Cathering to his? ... I never would have banished him from her society as long as she desired his. The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drank his blood.”
"And that insipid paltry creature attending her from duty and humanity!From pity and charity!He might as well plant an oak in a flower pot ,and expect it to thrive,as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares."
Heathcliff cries when C.is dying:"I cannot live without my life,I cannot live without my soul."
"You teach me now how cruel you've been - cruel and false.Why did you betray your own heart ,Cathy?You deserve this ,you have killed yourself....You loved me - then ,what right had you to leave
me?...What right, answer me, for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? .... I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer – but yours? How can I!
.I have not broken your heart - you have broken it,and in breaking it you have broken mine.So much the worse that I am strong....What kind of living will it be when you...Oh,God!Would you like to live with your
soul in the grave?'
“ May she wake in torment! , he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot and growning in a sudden paroxism of ungovernable passion: “ Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where? And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, my you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God, it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
“He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears.”
Heathcliff's revenge - "It is a moral teething,and I grind with greater energy ,in proportion to the increase of pain."
"I want the triumph of seeing my descendant fairly lord of their estates!My child hiring their children to till their father's lands for wages"
Heathcliff: “Do you know that, twenty times a day, I covet Hareton, with all his degradation! I would have loved the lad had he been someone else.” “I know what he suffers now, and he'll never be able to emerge from his coarsness and ignorance. And the best of it is, Hareton is damnabley fond of me”
Young Cathy: “Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery. Your are miserable, are you not! Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him! Nobody loves you – nobody will cry for you when you die! I wouldn't be your!”
Heathcliff about Hareton: “But when I look for his father in his face, I find Her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him. “
Cathy: “If you strike me, Hareton will strike you”
Hareton: “He said he wouldn't suffer a word to be uttered in his disparagement: if he were the devil, it didn't signify; he would stand by him;”
Heathcliff when watching Cathy and Hareton: “ It is a poor conclusion, is it not? An absurd termination to my violent exertions.
A change in him "I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction and I am too idle to destroy for nothing" And he speaks of Hareton
who "seemed a personification of my youth,not a human being, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. I am surrounded with her image. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her! Well, Hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love;of my wild endeavour to hold my right - my degradation,my pride,my happiness and my anguish."
“ I have to remind myself to breathe, almost to remind my heart to beat. I have a single wish, and my whole being and facilities are yearning to attain it. Oh, God, It is a long fight, I wish it were over! “
“ I have not written my will yet; and how to leave my property I cannot determine. I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth.”
He speaks of the manner in which he wishes to be buried "It is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening." “ I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven”.
'But poor Hareton, the most wronged, was the only one who really suffered much. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest. He pressed his hand, and kissed his sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating; and bemoaned him with that strong grief which springs naturally form a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel.”
“ We buried him, to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood, as he wished”.
Of Cathy and Hareton: “They are afraid of nothing. Together they would brave Satan and all his legions.”
Virginia Woolf: "That gigantic ambition to say something through the mouths of character which is not merely "I love" ,or "I hate" but "we ,the whole human race" and 'you, the eternal powers".
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