Jane Austen Famous Quotes

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. ~ J.K. Rowling

Let go of the past because its remembrance will give you pleasure. ~ Jane Austen

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships. ~ Sophie Hannah

Indeed how can one care for those one has never seen? ~ Jane Austen

Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much. ~ Jane Austen

What are men to rocks and mountains?
April 1, 1816: The Prince Regent enjoyed Jane Austen's novels, but he requested that she try her hand at a historical romance with less satirical and humorous elements. Austen was not amused. On this day, she wrote to the Prince Regent, I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life. ~ Jane Austen

I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be any more ~ Jane Austen

I do not dislike him. I consider him, on the contrary, as a very respectable man, who has everybody's good word and nobody's notice ... ~ Jane Austen

I would advise you merely to put on whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest - there is no occasion for anything more. ~ Jane Austen

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic. ~ Chris Bohjalian

You might not see one in a hundred with
gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley. ~ Jane Austen

Mr. Darcy, I could honestly forgive his vanity had he not wounded mine. ~ Jane Austen

That is an expression, Sir John," said Marianne, warmly, "which I particularly dislike. I abhor every common–place phrase by which wit is intended; and "setting one's cap at a man," or "making a conquest," are the most odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal; and if their construction could ever be deemed clever, time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity. ~ Jane Austen

Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not. ~ Jane Austen

You must be the best judge of your own happiness. ~ Jane Austen

Perfection should not have come quite so soon. ~ Jane Austen

JANE AUSTEN was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. The ~ Jane Austen

I do not like the studied air and artificial inflexions of voice which your very popular and most admired preachers generally have. A simple delivery is much better calculated to inspire devotion, and shows a much better taste. ~ Jane Austen

I will not allow books to prove any thing."
"But how shall we prove any thing?"
"We never shall. ~ Jane Austen

I am determined that nothing but the deepest love could ever induce me into matrimony. [Elizabeth] ~ Jane Austen

I will not allow it to be more man's nature than woman's to be inconstant ... ~ Jane Austen

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male. ~ Robert Silverberg

I am worn out with civility. ~ Jane Austen

A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.
It is something to think of ~ Jane Austen

He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It ~ Jane Austen

The great thing about Jane Austen - the reason we're all still obsessed with her - is that she gets inside a woman's mind and she taps into our fantasies of wanting to be accepted and loved for who we are. ~ Jennifer Coolidge

I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal. ~ Jane Austen

But her mind had never been in such perturbation; and it needed a very strong effort to appear attentive and cheerful till the usual hour of separating allowed her the relief of quiet reflection. ~ Jane Austen

I encourage him to be in his garden as often as possible. Then he has to walk to Rosings nearly every day ... I admit I encourage him in that also. ~ Jane Austen

I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment ~ Jane Austen

I can never be important to any one.'
'What is to prevent you?'
'Every thing - my situation - my foolishness and awkwardness. ~ Jane Austen

How much I love every thing that is decided and open! ~ Jane Austen

But yet it appeared to her so natural, so inevitable to strive against an inclination of that sort unrequited, that she could not comprehend its continuing very long in equal force. ~ Jane Austen

Words made you mighty. Words, stories, books: they could take you anywhere, and they could go out anywhere in the world. Jenny -- Jane -- picked up her pen, and began to write. ~ Lisa Pliscou

But neither the business alleged, nor the magnificent compliment, could win Catherine from thinking that some very different object must occasion so serious a delay of proper repose. To be kept up for hours, after the family were in bed, by stupid pamphlets was not very likely. There must be some deeper cause: something was to be done which could be done only while the household slept; and the probability that Mrs. Tilney yet lived, shut up for causes unknown, and receiving from the pitiless hands of her husband a nightly supply of coarse food, was the conclusion which necessarily followed. Shocking as was the idea, it was at least better than a death unfairly hastened, as, in the natural course of things, she must ere long be released. The suddenness of her reputed illness, the absence of her daughter, and probably of her other children, at the time - all favoured the supposition of her imprisonment. Its origin - jealousy perhaps, or wanton cruelty - was yet to be unravelled. ~ Jane Austen

For six weeks, I allow Bath is pleasant enough; but beyond that, it is the most tiresome place in the world. ~ Jane Austen

People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour. ~ Jane Austen

Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it. But the feelings which made such composure a disgrace, left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with an head-ache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough! ~ Jane Austen

... but her Letters were always unsatisfactory, and though she did not openly avow her feelings, yet every line proved her to be Unhappy. ~ Jane Austen

Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said. ~ Virginia Woolf

Marianne could never love by halves. ~ Jane Austen

She was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity; and happily disposed as is the human mind to be easily familiarized with any change for the better, it required several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any degree of tranquillity to her heart. ~ Jane Austen

I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively strong. ~ Jane Austen

If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite as leisure. ~ Jane Austen

Pride is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what would have others think of us. ~ Jane Austen

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. ~ Jane Austen

But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of goodwill which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude; 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. He ~ Jane Austen

Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land.

Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen pros ~ Steven Pinker

Mr. Bingley and Jane remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth. So near a vicinity to her mother and Meryton ~ Jane Austen

The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind. ~ Karen Joy Fowler