"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will."
"Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? Do you think that because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?"
"I would always rather be happy than dignified."
"I am not an angel...and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself."
"I am coming; I am coming, master."
"It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
"I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself."
"I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do."
"I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit."
"Reader, I married him."
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
"The shadows are as important as the light."
"I must resist those who punish me unjustly."
"I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame."
"I do not think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have."
"It is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it."
"To live amidst general regard, though it be but the regard of working people, is like 'sitting in sunshine, calm and sweet.'"
"You have a sly, indirect glance that makes me feel I could guess what you are thinking."
"I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close-set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there."
"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion."
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