Quotes About Austen

Jane Austen is very amusing.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating one's purported good taste, good breeding, and good sense: I am an especially adorable member of the ruling class.

What I admire about Austen (among hundreds of other commendable qualities) is her traditional rather than modern conception of morality. She sees it, as did Aristotle, Aquinas, and Marx, as a matter of public conduct, not as the inner light, interior emotions, what you happen to be feeling, what you find aesthetically alluring, and the like. She's an extremely tough-minded ethical realist in an increasingly corrupt, sentimentalist culture.

Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.

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

Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story!

I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'

Are you alright?" Jonathan stood before me, also soaked, though his hair looked quite... well, Darcy-esque; there was really no other word for it. Colin Firth and Jane Austen had ruined us chicks for other men, let's face it.

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

Remember your Austen: 'Let us hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.

I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.

Stupid people sometimes complain that there is no sex in Austen's novels. In fact, they are driven by the oceanic force of suppressed female desire, which dwarfs any opportunity for enactment. Actual sexual intercourse is the off-stage climax of the Austen novel. The possibility that defloration may be an anti-climax is to be found in the tingling ironies that cling to every word that Austen writes.

He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance.

Tu as vraiment fait regarder Clueless à ta classe de littérature anglaise pour illustrer l'actualité d'Emma de Jane Austen?

Mrs. Bennet, Lady Bertram, Mrs. Norris, Mrs. Elton, the Steele sisters, Fanny Dashwood, Elizabeth Elliot, Mrs. Clay, Lady Catherine de Bourgh … all differentiated, all unique in their unpleasantness.

Even Austen's famous first sentence has an echo in one of Burney's: "[It is] received wisdom among matchmakers, that a young lady without fortune has a less and less chance of getting off upon every public appearance."44

1894, George Saintsbury was confident that "a fondness for Miss Austen" could be considered "itself a patent of exemption from any possible charge of vulgarity.

Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.

We are now ready to tackle Dickens. We are now ready to embrace Dickens. We are now ready to bask in Dickens. In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.