Quotes About Austen

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable.

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

Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.

The visible structure of Jane Austen's stories may be flimsy enough; but their foundations drive deep down into the basic principles of human conduct. On her bit of ivory she has engraved a criticism of life as serious and as considers as Hardy's.

After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.

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.

Of all writers, [Jane Austen] is the most adept at creating both characters who seem to possess an independent existence and a narrator to whom readers feel able to turn, as if to an intimate friend.

There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help

I mean, I knew of Jane Austen's work, and I guess I'm a fan at a distance insofar as from a literary point of view, it's beautifully written.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.

Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

Mary-Lynnette: You have not read 'Pride and Prejudice'. Ash: Why not? Mary-Lynnette: Because Jane Austen was a human. Ash: How do you know? Mary-Lynnette: Well Jane Austen was a woman, and you're a chauvinist pig. Ash: Yes, well, that I can't argue.

Austen suggests that a gentleman is made, not born - and made only through a process of painful self-reflection and discovery.

That innovator is the aforementioned Hugh Thomson, who might be called the Colin Firth of Austen-inspired book illustration." (P. 52)

It's actually Jane Austen who pushes Louisa Musgrove off the slippery rocks.

She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that's remotely graceful. He'll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs.

Another raid followed on January 31, during which nine airships flew as far as Liverpool, along the way sending terrifying shadows scudding across the landscape of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Sensibility, in Austen's time, meant relying on one's feelings as a guide to behavior, as a guide to truth.

Austen knew that our biggest hopes sometimes rest on the smallest events, and that tragedy can be played out not just on a national stage or a foreign battlefield but also in a drawing-room conversation or on a country walk.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

I always read Jane Austen during wars. Her complete lack of interest in Napoleon's activities has a soothingly insulating effect.