She’s the author and woman we all love; she’s a legend and lady of literature. I’ve read her books and I’m sure you have too. Jane Austen is the writer whose work has embossed its mark in literary history. If I haven’t mentioned it in previous articles, I am a huge Pride and Prejudice fan. Readers of Austen can almost feel her words being spoken to them personally. She’s just that good. What’s not to love?
So when you can’t get enough of her novels and you need to be a little Austen-tatious, what do you do? You keep reading. This is a list of ten quotes from Jane Austen, to those who need a little lit-spiration.
1. “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Northanger Abbey
― Northanger Abbey
2. “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Northanger Abbey
― Northanger Abbey
3. “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Pride and Prejudice
― Pride and Prejudice
4. “I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Pride and Prejudice
― Pride and Prejudice
5. “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Pride and Prejudice
― Pride and Prejudice
6. “My idea of good company…is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.’
‘You are mistaken,’ said he gently, ‘that is not good company, that is the best.”
― Persuasion
‘You are mistaken,’ said he gently, ‘that is not good company, that is the best.”
― Persuasion
7. “It is only a novel… or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language”
― Northanger Abbey
― Northanger Abbey
8. “He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman’s daughter. So far we are equal.”
― Pride and Prejudice
― Pride and Prejudice
9. “Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”
― Emma
― Emma
10. “I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”
― Sense and Sensibility
― Sense and Sensibility
Feature Image Via The Telegraph