Heathcliff Quotes

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“‘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?‘”

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

“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!”

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

“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.”

“He shall never know I love him.”

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

″‘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.‘”

“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.”

“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.”

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