Joseph Wuthering Heights Quotes

Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one's head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower. ~ Joan Didion

Should you chance to read it a second or third time, Wuthering Heights comes at you afresh, in part because the novel seems to vanish into its own delirious origins once you've finished it, leaving no footprints, and in part because it is a literary force of nature such as you've never encountered before. ~ Daphne Merkin

Choosing between day and night. Edgar and Heathcliff. ~ Eileen Favorite

It's very kind of 'Wuthering Heights' where my parents' house is, moors and deserted. It's very wild and mystic. ~ Joanne Froggatt

Nay, you'll be ashamed of me everyday of your life," he answered; "and the more ashamed, the more you know me; and I cannot bide it. ~ Emily Bronte

How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. ~ Emily Bronte

Am I a romantic? I've seen 'Wuthering Heights' ten times. I'm a romantic. ~ Johnny Depp

Heathcliff, make the world stop right here. Make everything stop and stand still and never move again. Make the moors never change and you and I never change. ~ Emily Bronte

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. ~ Virginia Woolf

This is it
what all the hoopla is about, what Wuthering Heights is about
it all boils down to this feeling rushing through me in this moment with Joe as our mouths refuse to part. Who knew all this time I was one kiss away from being Cathy and Juliet and Elizabeth Bennet and Lady Chatterley!? ~ Jandy Nelson

That's exactly how I want you to feel. When you finish this book, I want you to be filled with curiosity. I want you to say, "I have to find out what happens next," and then I want you to head to your nearest library or bookstore to pick up a copy of Wuthering Heights. ~ Clare B. Dunkle

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year - but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex. at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, VILLETTE, EMMA, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, MIDDLEMARCH, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to, buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write WUTHERING HEIGHTS or JANE EYRE. ~ Virginia Woolf

Wuthering Heights love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moon in class and cried at them. ~ Anonymous

The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed, 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of LINTON? I had read EARNSHAW twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. ~ Emily Bronte

Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine
If he love with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years, as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have; the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be monopolized by him
Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse
It is not in him to be loved like me, how can she love in him what he has not? ~ Emily Bronte

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying onceself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag. ~ Joan Didion

And Heathcliff? What an evil fellow. Or is he merely misunderstood? ~ Mary O'Connell

He might as well plant an oak in a flowerpot, and expect it to thrive, as imagine he can restore her to vigour in the soil of his shallow cares! ~ Emily Bronte

Earnshaw is quite a famous name, thanks to Miss Brontë . I did not realise there were Earnshaws in this country."

Mrs. Earnshaw gave a sharp nod. "Aye. And Heathcliffs and Eyres, as well. Proper little thieves, those Brontë girls. ~ Deanna Raybourn

Anyhow, high school is just…The. Worst."

"Funny that you became a high school teacher, then," I say, and she laughs again.

"Something I should talk to my therapist about. Speaking of which, you could speak to the school counselor if you want. We have a psychiatrist on staff. A life coach too."

"Seriously?"

"I know, right? Finding ways to justify the tuition. Anyhow, if not them, feel free to come talk to me anytime. Students like you are the reason I chose to teach."

"Thanks."

"By the way, I look forward to your and Ethan's 'Waste Land' paper. You're two of my brightest students. I have great expectations." Dickens is next on the syllabus. A literary pun. No wonder Mrs. Pollack was destroyed in high school.

"We intend to reach wuthering heights," I say, and as I walk by, she reaches her hand up, and I can't help it - dorks unite! nerd power! - I give her a high five on my way out. ~ Julie Buxbaum

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a Saturday night - they all made sense, they were all part of the huge, dirty, torn social fabric. There was a war raging out there in the city and she was part of the fight, but the countryside unsettled her because she didn't know who the enemy was. She had always preferred North and South to Wuthering Heights. All that demented running around the moors, identifying yourself with the scenery, not a good role model for a woman. ~ Kate Atkinson

The guest was now the master of Wuthering Heights: he held firm possession, and proved to the attorney, who, in his turn, proved it to Mr. Linton, that Earnshaw had mortaged every yard of land he owned for cash to supply his mania for gaming; and he, Heathcliff, was the mortgagee.
In that manner, Hareton, who should now be the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy; and lives in his own house as a servant deprived of the advantage of wages, and quite unable to right himself, because of his friendlessness, and his ignorance that he has been wronged. ~ Emily Bronte

'The Thirteenth Tale' is reminiscent of 'Wuthering Heights' because you're never sure if it's a ghost or if people have gone a bit mad; that feeling that's been channelled all the way from Bronte is a really exciting one. ~ Tom Goodman-Hill

My mother used to push 'Wuthering Heights' on me as a boy, and I sensed from her breathy description of the story that it would make me laugh. I have no plans to find out if this is true. ~ Walter Kirn

I think sometimes in literature we kind of police ourselves. I know a lot of people talked about Twilight, and they would say, oh, but the heroine, she lets this man make her decisions. And I thought, that may not be the particular fantasy or trope that works for me.
But listen man, I read Wuthering Heights. I wanted me a little Heathcliff action. I mean, why can't we indulge that fantasy and also be like, And now I would like the ERA passed, please. Also, this lipstick is fuckin' killer. ~ Libba Bray

How a human being could have attempted such a book [Wuthering Heights] as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors. ~ George R. Graham

I'm glad nobody has asked me to adapt 'Wuthering Heights' because I think I would make a mess of it. Everybody makes a mess of it. I think the Bronte Sisters are mad. ~ Andrew Davies

He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments, 'till Catherine crossed his path. Shame at her scorn, and hope of her approval, were his first prompts to higher pursuits; and, instead of guarding him from one and winning him to the other, his endeavors to raise himself had produced just the contrary result. ~ Emily Bronte

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. ~ Diane Setterfield

But there's this one difference: one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver. Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first-rate qualities, and they are lost, rendered worst than unavailing. ~ Emily Bronte

I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights. ~ Jasper Fforde

Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought. ~ Anne Carson

I want to crawl to her feet, whimper to be forgiven, for loving her, for needing her more than my own life, for belonging to her more than my own soul."

"If he loved you with all the power of his soul for a whole lifetime, he couldn't love you as much as I do in a single day."

"...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same."

"If you ever looked at me once with what I know is in you, I would be your slave."
"Be with me always. Take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you."
~ Wuthering Heights ~ Emily Bronte

I didn't want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise? ~ Margaret Atwood

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. ~ Charlotte Bronte

It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him. ~ Emily Bronte

Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles, to raise your lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels, suspecting and doubting nothing, and always seeing friends where they are not sure of foes. ~ Emily Bronte

Heathcliff. The "hero" of Wuthering Heights. Although no one knows why.
He's mean, moody, and possibly a bit on the pongy side. Cathy loves him, though. She shows this by viciously rejecting him and marrying someone else for a laugh. Still, that is true love on the moors for you. ~ Louise Rennison