Quotes About Jane Austen

Growing up in the English countryside, I feel like I'm in a Jane Austen novel when I walk around. I just feel comfortable and confident in those surroundings.

On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.

Fpr ome aftermppm a week leading up to the formal, the entire senior school body would pile into our massive gymnasium and learn dances that we would NEVER DANCE AGAIN, except at our own children's formals, perhaps. Nevertheless, we threw ourselves into the task as if we were living in a Jane Austen novel and this was the only way we would ever fit into society. (from How to Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Sex and Teenage Confusion)

those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.

Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. . . . Every moment rather brought fresh agitation. It was an overpowering happiness.

There is a monsterous deal of stupid quizzing, & common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit.

Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.

Fortitude was always to be one of the great virtues for Jane Austen.

V. S. Pritchett has a challenging aside in which he describes Jane Austen as a war novelist, pointing out that the facts of the long war are basic to all her books.

Everything Jane Austen read came alive, but, at the same time, her natural empathy with those she encountered through her reading was kept in check by a keen sense of the ridiculous and of the potential absurdity of emotional display.

Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love.

A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world.

It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.

There was a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing and common-place nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit.

I have made myself two or three caps to wear of evenings since I came home, and they save me a world of torment as to hair-dressing, which at present gives me no trouble beyond washing and brushing, for my long hair is always plaited up out of sight, and my short hair curls well enough to want no papering.

Expect a most agreeable letter; for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say) I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end.

Mrs. Bennet was restored to her usual querulous serenity.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

She [Mrs. Bennet] was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.