Austen Quotes

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“I was quiet, but I was not blind.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.”
― Jane Austen

“I will only add, God bless you.”
― Jane Austen

“Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't. ”
― Shannon Hale (Austenland)

“Vanity, not love, has been my folly.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“And from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club

“The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”
― Jane Austen

“How clever you are, to know something of which you are ignorant.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“...I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.”
― Beth Pattillo, Mr. Darcy Broke My Heart

“She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
― Jane Austen

“Eudora Welty singles out for praise Austen's "habit of seeing both sides of her own subject - of seeing it indeed in the round". ... Both men and women can be vain about their appearances, selfish about money, overawed by rank, and limited by parochialism; both men and women can function capably, think profoundly, feel deeply, create imaginatively, laugh wittily, and love faithfully. Without vindicating the rights of anyone directly, Austen posits a humanism far ahead of her time. "How really modern she is, after all," Welty concludes of Austen.”
― Emily Auerbach, Searching for Jane Austen

“When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”
― Jane Austen

“Her [Mrs Croft's] manners were open, easy, and decided, like one who had no distrust of herself, and no doubts of what to do; without any approach to coarseness, however, or any want of good humour. Anne gave her credit, indeed, for feelings of great consideration towards herself, in all that related to Kellynch; and it pleased her.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“The conversation soon turned upon fishing, and she heard Mr. Darcy invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often as he chose while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering at the same time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing out those parts of the stream where there was usually most sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was walking arm in arm with Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of her wonder. Elizabeth said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly; the compliment must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was extreme; and continually was she repeating, "Why is he so altered? From what can it proceed? It cannot be for me, it cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this. It is impossible that he should still love me.”
― Jane Austen

“There were, of course, compensatory advantages to growing older. ‘As I must leave off being young,’ Jane admitted, ‘I find many Douceurs … I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.”
― Lucy Worsley, Jane Austen at Home

“Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“She knew she was smart. She had, after all, read Pride and Prejudice. Twice.”
― Polly Horvath

“Yes; he had done it. She was in the carriage, and felt that he had placed her there, that his will and his hands had done it, that she owed it to his perception of her fatigue, and his resolution to give her rest. She was very much affected by the view of his disposition towards her, which all these things made apparent. This little circumstance seemed the completion of all that had gone before. She understood him. He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjust resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Like in those Bunny Austen books you read where rabbits live in great parks with manor hutches?”
― Polly Horvath

“Does everybody know everything in this town!”
― Vaishnavi Nair K., Aided By Austen

“This early story, ridiculously set out in its twelve ‘chapters’ each merely a sentence long, is the perfect introduction to Jane Austen’s satirical, sparkling naughtiness. Jane’s nephew, in his influential early biography, would depict his maiden aunt as full of virtue, kindness and meekness. ‘There was in her nothing eccentric or angular,’ he thought, ‘no ruggedness of temper; no singularity of manner.’ Well, the evidence of her early writings suggests otherwise. They are simply packed full of utterly eccentric and angular girls doing bad deeds.”
― Lucy Worsley

“Like Wollstonecraft, Austen rejects the notion that ‘man was made to reason, woman to feel.’ Perhaps Austen was tired of reading passages in conduct books suggesting that young women were innately sensitive, quivering, emotional messes.”
― Emily Auerbach

“[...] benché in genere bastino pochissime ore trascorse nella fatica di parlare incessantemente a esaurire molti più argomenti di quanti possano avere davvero in comune due creature raziocinanti, con gli innamorati è diverso. Tra loro nessun argomento è mai finito, niente è davvero detto che non sia ripetuto almeno una ventina di volte.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”
― Jane Austen

“What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She’s an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt,
sentimentalist culture.”
― Terry Eagleton