Wuthering Heights Summary Quotes

Joseph is the wearisomest and self-righteous Pharisee who ever ransacked the Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbor. ~ Emily Bronte

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them. ~ Alice McDermott

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

What do you think is my favourite book? Just now, I mean; I change every three days. "Wuthering Heights." Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth churchyard. She had never known any men in her life; how could she imagine a man like Heathcliff?
I couldn't do it, and I'm quite young and never outside the John Grier Asylum - I've had every chance in the world. Sometimes a dreadful fear comes over me that I'm not a genius. Will you be awfully disappointed, Daddy, if I don't turn out to be a great author? ~ Jean Webster

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

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

Just think of Emily Bronte, for example: psychotically bookish - but was there ever a woman screaming out so loudly for a good f***ing? I even suspect that's why Wuthering Heights carries on decades too long rather than sensibly drawing the curtains a little after Cathy's death. It was Bronte saying, 'Look - I'm simply going to keep on writing this stuff until someone comes and shags me raw. ~ Mil Millington

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

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

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

I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles. ~ Marisha Pessl

Within the sphere of English fiction Heathcliff stands alone. Therefore, if we do not understand him, then it is highly probable we were never intended to do so, so that we should try to realize and accept the fact that there may be just one or two things yet left in heaven and earth not dreamt of by our philosophy. ~ Eleanor Mcnees

I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one. ~ Marlon Brando

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

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

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

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

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

Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not. ~ Joshua Foer

Treachery and violence are a just return for treachery and violence. ~ Wuthering Heights By Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights, considered the most romantic book ever written by those who had never read it carefully. ~ Catherine Lowell

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

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

That made her cry, at first; and then, being repulsed continually hardened her, and she laughed if I told her to say she was sorry for her faults and beg to be forgiven. ~ Emily Bronte

Some people are very unfulfilled. In consequence they write passionately good romance because they believe that they could still find happiness. Emily Bronte was not a fulfilled woman but the passion she felt went into Wuthering Heights. ~ Charlotte Bingham

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

'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

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 rises from your greater misery! You are miseable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldnt't be you! ~ Emily Bronte

If this was love, it felt different than she'd imagined it would, walking a thin line between passion and terror. It was Romeo and Juliet. It was Wuthering Heights. And Val was left petrified from the boiling intensity of it. ~ Nenia Campbell

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

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

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

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

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights. ~ Kate Bush

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

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

I myself have never had one, but now I can picture one. I didn't like Wuthering Heights at first, but the minute that specter, Cathy, scrabbled her bony fingers on the window glass - I was grasped by the throat and not let go. With that Emily I could hear Heathcliff's pitiful cries upon the moors. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

I wish I could hold you,' she continued, bitterly, 'till we were both dead! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, "That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I've loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I are going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!" Will you say so, Heathcliff? ~ Emily Bronte

[On Wuthering Heights] Here, all the faults of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.

[North British Review, 1847] ~ James Lorimer

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

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

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

Oliver was Oliver,' I said, as if that summed things up.

'Parce que c'était lui, parce que c'était moi,' my father added, quoting Montaigne's all-encompassing explanation for his friendship with Etienne de la Boétie.

I was thinking, instead, of Emily Brontë's words: because 'he's more myself than I am. ~ Andre Aciman