Miss Havisham Quotes:

I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.

- Charles Dickens

source: Charles Dickens (1881). “Great Expectations”, p.436

topic: Heart, Ice, Miss Havisham, Havisham

Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!

- Charles Dickens

topic: Heart, Tears, Stronger, Miss Havisham, Deeper Love

I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.

- Charles Dickens

source: Charles Dickens (1881). “Great Expectations”, p.78

topic: Flower, Eye, Scary, Miss Havisham, Bridal

Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy. -Miss Havisham

- Charles Dickens

topic: Heart, Pride, Missing, Miss Havisham, Havisham

I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter - as I did!

- Charles Dickens

topic: Love, Giving Up, Real, Miss Havisham, Great Expectations

. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .

- Charles Dickens

topic: Healing, Order, Mind, Miss Havisham, Great Expectations

I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.

- Charles Dickens

topic: Promise, Most Romantic, Reason, Miss Havisham, Love Literature

Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive her.

- Charles Dickens

source: Charles Dickens (2016). “Great Expectations”, p.378, Xist Publishing

topic: Writing, Names, Forgiving, Miss Havisham

It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.

- Charles Dickens

source: Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Great Expectations”, p.343, Cosimo, Inc.

topic: Boys, Thinking, Years, Miss Havisham, Susceptibility

Miss Havisham is an important feminine literary figure in the tradition of Antigone (though it's significant that Antigone is fighting to bury something and Miss Havisham refuses, as it were, to bury the corpse). Like Hamlet, she's focused on what everyone would rather not know or would like to forget, and she seems crazy / stuck as well as bitter, but she's also a perfect prototype of a performance artist. She's intentionally hard to deal with inviting the audience to remain with the violated body, the evidence of violence.

- Laura Mullen

topic: Crazy, Fighting, Artist, Miss Havisham, Inviting

I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.

- Charles Dickens

source: 1860-1 Pip. Great Expectations, ch.4.

topic: Funny, Humorous, Expectations, Miss Havisham, Great Expectations Important

She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

- Jasper Fforde

topic: Elderly, Expectations, Missing, Miss Havisham, Havisham

We live in a culture that insists on "moving on" (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's "Miss Havisham" with some (self) recognition if not relief.

- Laura Mullen

topic: Loyalty, Moving, Self, Miss Havisham, Dickens

Miss Havisham is a glitch in the smooth functioning of the Patriarchy, enforcing awareness of a moment of social disaster and personal shame, something it seems she would want us to forget (but no one would forget). (Maybe an interesting "discussion question" for readers of Complicated Grief might be, "What do Terry Barton and Miss Havisham have in common?"?)

- Laura Mullen

topic: Grief, Interesting, Missing, Miss Havisham, Complicated Grief