Quotes from Jane Austen

If I am missed it will appear. I may be discovered by those who want to see me. I shall not be in any doubtful, or distant, or unapproachable region.

In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.

Words were insufficient for the elevation of his [Mr Collins'] feelings; and he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.

Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief

Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by whom he finally seated himself

There is hardly any personal defect, replied Anne, which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.

Her form, though not so correct as her sister's, in having the advantage of height, was more striking; and her face was so lovely, that when in the common cant of praise she was called a beautiful girl, truth was less violently outraged than usually happens.

Reluctantly, and with much hesitation, did she then begin what might perhaps, at the end of half an hour, be termed, by the courtesy of her hearers, an explanation;

We have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition…

She began to curl her hair and long for balls

You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature.  —Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves.

What a revolution in her ideas!

on the portrayal of women in literature) Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

She felt the loss of Willoughby's character yet more heavily than she had felt the loss of his heart.

Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

I dearly love a laugh.

To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

The promised notification was hanging over her head. The postman's knock within the neighbourhood was beginning to bring its daily terrors -and if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.

I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him than I am with any other creature in the world.

But your good opinion is rarely bestowed and therefore more worth the earning.

There could have been no two hearts So open, no tastes so similar, no feelings So in unison, no countenances So beloved. Now they were strangers; Nay, worse than strangers, for they Could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.

You know that men can love forever. Please belive that my love could never end.

Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still. She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.