If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
I was reading a book for work and it referenced the above, without attributing it to anyone. The way the author wrote about it I knew the passage must be well-known and so I typed the words in Google and discovered they are from Jane Eyre, which I have never read.
These words jumped out at me with a vengeance because at the time I was reading them I was experiencing a huge amount of self-loathing and I have been going through this solitude lately that feels both good and bad. Good in that I cannot possibly make as many social faux pas (or worse) if I am not around others and bad because, well...after a while solitude can just feel so lonely and as the passage that follows so aptly puts it:
"No: I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don’t love me, I would rather die than live—I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen."
I feel like I cannot really write about these words more, or truly know them, without also knowing the full context and more about Jane Eyre. The words are so haunting me that I went into the Kindle store and just downloaded it for free.
I hope to get to it after I finish a book that I have been purposely taking my time with because it has so much to say and I think that it may really help me embrace solitude better without embracing the self-loathing. It really is a wonderful book:
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