Quotes About Austen

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen . My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity—how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

I can always go back to Jane Austen. 'Mansfield Park' is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

Jane Austen makes me detest all her characters, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her characters up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worthwhile, too. Some day I might examine the other end of her books and see.

Kissing Hugh was lovely. Glad I invented it. Can't rely on Austen for a snog, that's for sure.

I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless.

But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

That pesky movie version was the culprit. Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice when she was sixteen, read it a dozen times since, and read the other Austen novels at least twice, except Northanger Abbey (of course).

To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations.

Modern fiction brings out the evil in domestic lives, ordinary relations, people like you and me -- Reader! Bruder! as Humbert said. Evil in Austen, as in most great fiction, lies in the inability to see others, hence to empathize with them. What is frightening is that this blindness can exist in the best of us (Eliza Bennet) as well as the worst (Humbert). We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, or imposing our visions and desires on others.

It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.

These women, genteel and beautiful, are the rebels who say no to the choices made by silly mothers, incompetent fathers (there are seldom any wise fathers in Austen's novels) and the rigidly orthodox society. They risk ostracism and poverty to gain love and companionship, and to embrace that elusive goal at the heart of democracy: the right to choose.

The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing

I thought he was the man I'd been waiting for. A hero right out of Austen. The one who would finally make everything okay. Only he wasn't real. Like Austen's characters, he was fiction. Mr. Darcy broke my heart.

For many years, biographers and scholars, beginning with her great nephew James Austen-Leigh, presented her as a quiet, reserved, proper woman, but one has only to read her novels to realize that she was nothing so bland. Her genius, her craft, and her timeless prose are no secret, but thanks to Cassandra's scissors, most other aspects of her life will probably remain a mystery.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love." (of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, Persuasion)

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

'Clueless' is an adaptation of 'Emma' by Jane Austen. It works either way: if you know the book and if you don't.

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.