Heathcliff Quotes

“If all else 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.”

“If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.”

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

“Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! . . . It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”

“I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong.”

“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.”

“Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

″‘He’s not a human being,’ she retorted; ‘and he has no claim on my charity. I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death, and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen: and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him.‘”

“You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort.”

“You loved me—then what right had you to leave me?”

“Do I want to live? . . . [W]ould you like to live with your soul in the grave?”

“I have to remind myself to breathe—almost to remind my heart to beat!”

“He shall never know I love him.”

“You know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!”

“‘Are you possessed with a devil,’ he pursued, savagely, ‘to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me?‘”

“Time brought resignation, and a melancholy sweeter than common joy.”

He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction: a look of hatred; unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.

“Then I hope his ghost will haunt you; and I hope Mr. Heathcliff will never get another tenant till the Grange is a ruin,” she answered, sharply.

“He must have had some ups and downs in life to make him such a churl. Do you know anything of his history?”

He had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend

Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won’t let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and, he says, he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders.

“I saw they were full of stupid admiration; she is so immeasurably superior to them—everybody on earth, is she not, Nelly?”

″...for when Heathcliff expressed contempt of Linton in his presence, she could not half coincide, as she did in his absence; and when Linton evinced disgust and antipathy to Heathcliff, She dared not treat his sentiments with indifference, as if depreciation of her playmate were of scarcely any consequence to her.”

“Nothing—only look at the almanack on that wall;” he pointed to a framed sheet hanging near the window, and continued, “The crosses are for the evenings you have spent with the Lintons, the dots for those spent with me. Do you see? I’ve marked every day.”

My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning:

It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; 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’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

As soon as you become Mrs. Linton, he loses friend, and love, and all!

Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.

“Nelly, I see now 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.”

Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.

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 it flashed back, each time more confidently, the undisguised delight he drank from hers.

“I’ve fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice;”

“I’m not jealous of you,” replied the mistress; “I’m jealous for you. Clear your face: you sha’n’t scowl at me! If you like Isabella, you shall marry her. But do you like her? Tell the truth, Heathcliff! There, you won’t answer. I’m certain you don’t.”

“I know you have treated me infernally—infernally! Do you hear? And if you flatter yourself that I don’t perceive it, you are a fool; and if you think I can be consoled by sweet words, you are an idiot: and if you fancy I’ll suffer unrevenged, I’ll convince you of the contrary, in a very little while!”

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him; they crush those beneath them.

Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous: for that cause, and to prevent worse consequences, I shall deny you hereafter admission into this house, and give notice now that I require your instant departure. Three minutes’ delay will render it involuntary and ignominious.”

“Mr. Linton, I’m mortally sorry that you are not worth knocking down!”

“Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his army against a colony of mice.”

“Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend—if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all, when I am pushed to extremity!”

“Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me? It is impossible for you to be my friend and his at the same time; and I absolutely require to know which you choose.”

We’ve braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come.

Hereafter she is only my sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me.”

“You fight against that devil for love as long as you may; when the time comes, not all the angels in heaven shall save him!”

“In what has he wronged you, to warrant this appalling hatred?”

I do hate him—I am wretched—I have been a fool!

“had he been in my place, and I in his, though I hated him with a hatred that turned my life to gall, I never would have raised a hand against him.”

“The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!”

You know as well as I do, that for every thought she spends on Linton she spends a thousand on me!

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.

“Don’t put faith in a single word he speaks. He’s a lying fiend! a monster, and not a human being!

“Whatever he may pretend, he wishes to provoke Edgar to desperation: he says he has married me on purpose to obtain power over him; and he sha’n’t obtain it—I’ll die first! I just hope, I pray, that he may forget his diabolical prudence and kill me!”

The single pleasure I can imagine is to die, or to see him dead!”

“The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain.”

“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 am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!’ Will you say so, Heathcliff?”

“I’m not wishing you greater torment than I have, Heathcliff. I only wish us never to be parted: and should a word of mine distress you hereafter, think I feel the same distress underground, and for my own sake, forgive me! Come here and kneel down again! You never harmed me in your life. Nay, if you nurse anger, that will be worse to remember than my harsh words! Won’t you come here again? Do!”

You loved me—then what right had you to leave me? What right—answer me—

Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it.

I have not broken your heart—you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

I notice, when I enter his presence, the muscles of his countenance are involuntarily distorted into an expression of hatred;

Catherine had an awfully perverted taste to esteem him so dearly, knowing him so well.

“He’s not a human being,” she retorted; “and he has no claim on my charity. I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death, and flung it back to me.

When Heathcliff is in, I’m often obliged to seek the kitchen and their society, or starve among the damp uninhabited chambers; when he is not, as was the case this week, I establish a table and chair at one corner of the house fire, and never mind how Mr. Earnshaw may occupy himself; and he does not interfere with my arrangements.

Heathcliff, if I were you, I’d go stretch myself over her grave and die like a faithful dog.

You had distinctly impressed on me the idea that Catherine was the whole joy of your life: I can’t imagine how you think of surviving her loss.

his weakness was the only time when I could taste the delight of paying wrong for wrong.”

After all, it is preferable to be hated than loved by him.

But I loved Catherine too; and her brother requires attendance, which, for her sake, I shall supply. Now that she’s dead, I see her in Hindley: Hindley has exactly her eyes, if you had not tried to gouge them out, and made them black and red; and her—

″‘But then,’ I continued, holding myself ready to flee, ‘if poor Catherine had trusted you, and assumed the ridiculous, contemptible, degrading title of Mrs. Heathcliff, she would soon have presented a similar picture! She wouldn’t have borne your abominable behaviour quietly: her detestation and disgust must have found voice.’

“You must try to love him, as you did your mother, and then he will love you.”

and naturally he’ll be fonder of you than any uncle, for you are his own.

“Well,” replied I, “I hope you’ll be kind to the boy, Mr. Heathcliff, or you’ll not keep him long; and he’s all you have akin in the wide world, that you will ever know—remember.”

“Only nobody else must be kind to him: I’m jealous of monopolising his affection.”

“The harm of it is, that her father would hate me if he found I suffered her to enter your house; and I am convinced you have a bad design in encouraging her to do so,”

“He thought me too poor to wed his sister,” answered Heathcliff, “and was grieved that I got her: his pride was hurt, and he’ll never forgive it.”

I know what he suffers now, for instance, exactly: it is merely a beginning of what he shall suffer, though. And he’ll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and ignorance.

But there’s this difference; one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver.

If the dead villain could rise from his grave to abuse me for his offspring’s wrongs, I should have the fun of seeing the said offspring fight him back again, indignant that he should dare to rail at the one friend he has in the world!”

“No, it was not because I disliked Mr. Heathcliff, but because Mr. Heathcliff dislikes me; and is a most diabolical man, delighting to wrong and ruin those he hates, if they give him the slightest opportunity.

I’ve got your letters, and if you give me any pertness I’ll send them to your father. I presume you grew weary of the amusement and dropped it, didn’t you? Well, you dropped Linton with it into a Slough of Despond. He was in earnest: in love, really. As true as I live, he’s dying for you; breaking his heart at your fickleness: not figuratively, but actually.

He pines for kindness, as well as love; and a kind word from you would be his best medicine.

“I promise to marry Linton: papa would like me to: and I love him. Why should you wish to force me to do what I’ll willingly do of myself?”

Miss Linton, I shall enjoy myself remarkably in thinking your father will be miserable: I shall not sleep for satisfaction.

As to your promise to marry Linton, I’ll take care you shall keep it; for you shall not quit this place till it is fulfilled.”

“because she must either accept him or remain a prisoner, and you along with her, till your master dies.”

“Mr. Heathcliff, you’re a cruel man, but you’re not a fiend; and you won’t, from mere malice, destroy irrevocably all my happiness.”

“He says she hates me and wants me to die, that she may have my money; but she shan’t have it: and she shan’t go home! She never shall!—she may cry, and be sick as much as she pleases!”

“Linton is all I have to love in the world, and though you have done what you could to make him hateful to me, and me to him, you cannot make us hate each other. And I defy you to hurt him when I am by, and I defy you to frighten me!”

″‘I know he has a bad nature,’ said Catherine: ‘he’s your son. But I’m glad I’ve a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that reason I love him.‘”

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.

Nobody loves you—nobody will cry for you when you die!

“Disturbed her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years—incessantly—remorselessly—till yesternight;”

“I have a strong faith in ghosts: I have a conviction that they can, and do, exist among us!”

“You may laugh, if you will; but I was sure I should see her there. I was sure she was with me, and I could not help talking to her.”

“We know that!” answered Heathcliff; “but his life is not worth a farthing, and I won’t spend a farthing on him.”

“You shouldn’t grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!”

Your love will make him an outcast and a beggar.

Those two who have left the room are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me; and that appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony.

“Five minutes ago Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being;

“In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am surrounded with her image!”

“O God! It is a long fight; I wish it were over!”

“Last night I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!”

“But you might as well bid a man struggling in the water rest within arms’ length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I’ll rest.”

“I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me.”

Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on ‘em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death:—