Life's Pleasures Quote by Emily Bronte

Dreams, for Emily Bronte, aren’t fluffy nighttime cinema; they’re invasive substances, doing chemistry on the self. The line’s brilliance is how quickly it turns the romantic notion of dreaming into a kind of psychic fermentation. “Gone through and through me” suggests permeation, not inspiration. These aren’t ideas she chose; they’re experiences that penetrated, lingered, and rewired her from the inside.

The simile is the masterstroke: “like wine through water.” It’s not wine into water, a comforting dilution, but wine through it, as if the mind were a porous medium. The image carries two implications at once. First, inevitability: once wine passes through, the water is no longer “itself.” Second, irreversible staining: “altered the color of my mind” frames consciousness as something you can tint permanently, not merely persuade. Bronte doesn’t claim enlightenment; she describes contamination that somehow becomes aesthetic, even desirable. Wine is pleasure, intoxication, sacrament. Dreams, then, are both seduction and conversion.

Context matters. Bronte wrote in a culture that prized moral clarity and social legibility, especially for women, yet her fiction (Wuthering Heights most of all) insists on the unruly interior: obsession, wild attachment, a self that refuses polite borders. This sentence reads like a quiet manifesto for that project. She’s legitimizing the inner life as an engine of transformation, arguing that what happens in the unseen can be more consequential than what happens in public. The subtext is almost defiant: I was changed by forces you can’t audit, and I’m not apologizing for the person they made.