| | "Those who tell their own story you know must be listened to with caution." - Sanditon
"If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village she must seek them abroad." - Northanger Abbey
"I do not want people to be very agreable [sic], as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal." - a letter to her sister Cassandra
"And now may I dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine's portion; to a pillow strewed with thorns & wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three monthes." - Northanger Abbey
"Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how." - Pride & Prejudice
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment." - Mr Darcy, Pride & Prejudice
"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love." - Pride & Prejudice
"I suppose there may be a hundred different ways of being in love." - Emma
"The unpleasantness of appearing fickle is certainly great--but if you think you want Punishment for past Illusions, there it is--and nothing can compare to the misery of being bound without Love, bound to one, & preferring another. That is a Punishment which you do not deserve." - letter to her niece Fanny Knight
"I am at present more impressed with the possible Evil that may arise to You from engaging yourself to him--in word or mind--than with anything else. When I consider how few young Men you have yet seen much of--how capable you are (yes, I do still think you very capable) of being really in love--and how full of temptation the next 6 or 7 years of your Life will probably be--(it is the very period of Life for the strongest attachments to be formed)--I cannot wish you with your present very cool feelings to devote yourself in honour to him." - letter to her niece Fanny Knight
"Wisdom is better than Wit, & in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side." - letter to her niece, Fanny Knight
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." - Pride & Prejudice
"There was not one lord in the neighborhood; no -- not even a baronet. There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at their door -- not one young man whose origin was unknown. Her father had no ward, and the squire of the parish no children.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way." - Of Catherine Morland, our would-be heroine
Northanger Abbey
"I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible." - Catherine to Henry, Northanger Abbey
"You should never fret about trifles." - Catherine's mother, Northanger Abbey
" . . . if it be true, as a celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is known to have dreamt of her." - Henry Tilney, Northanger Abbey
"Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?" - Captain Wentworth, Persuasion
"'I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.'" - Darcy, answering Lizzy's question about how he ever began to fall in love with her in the first place, Pride & Prejudice
"'Those who do not complain are never pitied.'" - Mrs. Bennet, Pride & Prejudice
"I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know." - letter to Cassandra, on Pride & Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennet
“'Brandon is just the kind of man,’ said Willoughby one day when they were talking of him together, 'whom everybody speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.’” - HORRID Mr Willoughby, Sense & Sensibility
"I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her suckling child..." - Jane on Sense & Sensibility
" . . . I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together." - Jane to her sister Cassandra, in a letter of January 9, 1796, about flirting with Tom Lefroy at the ball the night before
And, finally, a quote about Miss Jane Austen:
"She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself." - Cassandra, after Jane's death
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| | Posted 7/5/2008 11:57 PM - 41 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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