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

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

“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)

“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

“Anne always contemplated them as some of the happiest creatures of her acquaintance; but still, saved as we all are, by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments; and envied them nothing but that seemingly perfect good understanding and agreement together, that good-humoured mutual affection, of which she had known so little herself with either of her sisters.”
― 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

“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

“...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

“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 was a great deal of good sense in all this; but there are some situations of human mind in which good sense has very little power; and Catherine's feelings contradicted almost every position her mother advanced.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“It is his vegetable ambition never to stir.”
― Margaret Doody, Jane Austen's Names: Riddles, Persons, Places

“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

“Seguramente si nuestro afecto es recíproco, nuestros corazones se entenderán. No somos un par de chiquillos para guardar una irritada reserva, ser mal dirigidos por la inadvertencia de algún momento o jugar como con un fantasma con nuestra propia felicidad".”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Quoting her [Jane Austen] is the second-best recipe for happiness I've ever heard of.”
― Devoney Looser, The Daily Jane Austen: A Year of Quotes

“But rather than end this book with any truth universally acknowledged, I'll riff with this: I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend haughty, highbrow exclusivity or celebrate uncritical adulation.”
― Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen

“She was not born, but rather became, Jane Austen.”
― Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen

“When judgment is marginalized or forbidden, nothing remains save politics. The only permitted way to compare Jane Austen and Maya Angelou, or Mozart and Meshuggah, is in terms of their rival political postures. And then the point of studying Jane Austen or Mozart is lost.”
― Robert Scruton

“... but pretty women in search of husbands are always more numerous than men of large fortunes looking to marry.”
― Catherine Hemingway, The Matchmaker of Pemberley: An Amorous Sequel to All Jane Austen's Novels

“Thus began the courtship of two people perfectly suited to one another in temperament, way of thinking, and resemblance of character.”
― Catherine Hemingway, The Matchmaker of Pemberley: An Amorous Sequel to All Jane Austen's Novels