“Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.”

“Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose.”

“Will looked up in apparent relief when Charlotte and Tessa came in. "Will," Charlotte said, "You remember Miss Gray?"
"My recollection of her," said Will, "is most vivid indeed.”

“And now something strange happened to our Charlotte. While busy painting, as she always was, she fell asleep in the midday sun. And when she awoke, the finished portrait of her once so ardently beloved Daberlohn [ = Alfred Wolfsohn ] lay before her. However, she tore the sheet into a hundred thousand shreds.... she sought for an explanation... Then her glace fell on one of her old paintings representing Death and the Maiden. And suddenly she knew…”

“A massive fir, it rose to nearly touch the ceiling at the far end of the ballroom. When Will asked Charlotte how on earth it had gotten in there, she had only waved her hands and said something about Magnus.”

“She never stumbles,
she's got no place to fall.
She's nobody's child,
the law can't touch her at all.”

“Werther had a love for Charlotte
Such as words could never utter;
Would you know how first he met her?
She was cutting bread and butter.”

“Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.”

“Will!" Charlotte threw up her hands. "Why didn't you say so?"
"You know, the books on demon pox are in the library," Will said with an injured tone. "I wasn't preventing anyone from reading them”

“The roar of the.45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly, she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in.
"How c-could you?" she gasped.
I had only a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.
"It was easy," I said.”