"Angry people are not always wise."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all."
— Jane Austen

"How I wished I lived in a Jane Austen novel!"
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage."
— Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

"Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles."
— Tracy Chevalier

"It has the permanent quality of literature."
— Virginia Woolf

"I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. (Correspondence to George Henry Lewes, January 12, 1848)"
— Charlotte Brontë

"In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Jane Austen never repeats herself."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters. "
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Jane Austen's narrative style seems to me to show (especially in the later novels) a curiously chameleon-like faculty; it varies in colour as the habits of expression of the several characters impress themselves on the relation of the episode in which they are involved, and on the description of their situations."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"I suspect that Jane Austen's practice of denying herself the aid of figurative language which, as much as any of her other habits of expression, repelled Charlotte Brontë, and has alienated other readers, conscious with a dissatisfaction with her style that they have not cared to analyse. "
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"The visible structure of Jane Austen's stories may be flimsy enough; but their foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considers as Hardy's. "
— Lord David Cecil

"The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility? "
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"As for Elizabeth Bennet, our chief reason for accepting her point of view as a reflection of her author's is the impression that she bears of sympathy between them--an impression of which almost every reader would be sensible, even if it had not the explicit confirmation of Jane Austen's letters. Yet, as she is presented to us in Pride and Prejudice, she is but a partial and sometimes perverse observer. "
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)

"Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character."
— Mary Lascelles (Jane Austen and Her Art)