“Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night–of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told in her own quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal–I pronounced judgment to this effect:–That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life: that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.”
–
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, p. 169