Mary Lascelles Quotes

#1. Landscapes we must owe something to the eye of the beholder.

Mary Lascelles

#2. The sole agents, indeed, in the action of her novels are individual human beings. And the comedy is the outcome of their making fools of themselves and of one another.

Mary Lascelles

#3. Others beside Jane Austen have made their Eltons, though none quite so cooly as she.

Mary Lascelles

#4. A story conducted by the time of a clock and calendars alone would be a story not of human beings but of mechanical toys.

Mary Lascelles

#5. Sympathy compounded of liking and compassion in varying proportions evidently seemed to Jane Austen the most natural inventive to imaginative interest in a character.

Mary Lascelles

#6. A clever girl may pass through the phase of foolish miss on the way to sensible woman.

Mary Lascelles

#7. Jane Austen never repeats herself.

Mary Lascelles

#8. In Jane Austen it was the critical faculty that would not be quieted; and that faculty in her, played on men and women.

Mary Lascelles

#9. Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sense and Sensibility?

Mary Lascelles

#10. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.

Mary Lascelles

#11. Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him.

Mary Lascelles