Top 100 Quotes About Austen
#1. 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.
L.J.Smith
#2. The celestial brightness of Pride and Prejudice is unequalled even in Jane Austen's other work; after a life of much disappointment and grief, in which some people would have seen nothing but tedium and emptiness, she stepped forth as an author, breathing gaiety and youth, robed in dazzling light.
Elizabeth Jenkins
#3. Jane Austen has taught me to view the ridiculous and rude with amusement rather than disdain.
Natalie Tyler
#4. One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.
Alessandra Stanley
#5. I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.
Naomie Harris
#6. Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.
Gurinder Chadha
#7. She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
Susanna Clarke
#8. My new favorite title is How Jane Austen Ruined My Life. I don't have the courage to read it, though. I'm afraid to discover she's ruined mine as well.
Katherine Reay
#9. [Jane] Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories
entering into their feelings, validating their experiences
is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
William Deresiewicz
#10. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
#11. 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
#12. One of the reasons we all still read Jane Austen is because her books are about universal things which still matter today - love, money, family. They haven't gone out of fashion, so it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater to rework her in a contemporary style.
Val McDermid
#13. [On Jane Austen] She was fully possessed of the idealism which is a necessary ingredient of the great satirist. If she criticized the institutions of earth, it was because she had very definite ideas regarding the institutions of heaven.
Rebecca West
#15. I've done my share of period stuff. I'm not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses.
Tom Hiddleston
#16. Sophie's mother's voice trilled from the hallway, "William and Sophie Claire, won't you please come join us in the drawing room?" "You have a drawing room?" Will asked. "She's probably been rereading Jane Austen and decided to rename the living room.
Lauren Layne
#17. Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Terry Eagleton
#18. Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Mark Twain
#19. Matthais: *Sighs* England. I'd take my Valentine to England on a tour of all the places from Jane Austen's books. Derbyshire, Mr. Darcy's house. Places like that.
Ayden: You're really milking that whole dark, brooding thing.
A&E Kirk
#20. She liked to laugh that a young widow who'd just come into a good fortune must be, to misquote Jane Austen, in want of a husband.
Jennifer Ashley
#21. We've been texting for weeks. Surely it's rather like in Jane Austen's day when they did letter-writing for months and months and then just, like, immediately got married?'
'Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine-year-old off Twitter on the second date is not "rather like Jane Austen's day".
Helen Fielding
#22. Miss Austen's novels ... seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer ... is marriageableness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.
Azar Nafisi
#24. Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
#26. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#27. I feel weird." Caroline blinked a few times. "Do you feel weird?"
Brooks shrugged. "How weird? We're all dressed like people in a Jane Austen book. I think weird comes with the territory.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#28. To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove.
Mason Cooley
#29. 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
#30. 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.
David Cecil
#31. To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations.
Mary Balogh
#32. Power is never taken from us. It is only given away," Austen said softly.
Kirsten Beyer
#33. 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. JANE AUSTEN
Melanie Shankle
#34. I am reading Ian Rankins book Doors Open and am enjoying his dark Edinburgh narrative will rate soon once I have read it. I am also a fan of Jane Austen and have visited her Museum House in Chawton, Hampshire every year for the last three years. My Favourite book is Sense and Sensibility.
Ian Rankin
#35. If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.
Sebastian Faulks
#36. After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#37. It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.
(Jane Austen)
Jane Austen
#38. Not to harp on Jane Austen, but do you know why everyone loves Darcy?"
"Here we go. Austen has the answer for everything." Shelby laughed outright. There were no six degrees of separation for Rebecca: everything related directly back to Jane.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#39. I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women
you know
long-suffering, dutiful
but all right in the end
a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers.
Peter Greenaway
#40. 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.
Michael Dirda
#42. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
J.K. Rowling
#43. 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.
Karen Joy Fowler
#44. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
A. N. Wilson
#45. Jane Austen's characters for women are always very strong, opinionated and elegantly written, so they're always great for an actress to have a chance to do.
Tamsin Egerton
#47. As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.'
Maureen Dowd
#48. 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!
Colm Toibin
#49. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.
Mary Lascelles
#50. For those of us who suspect all the mysteries of life are contained in the microcosm of the family, that personal relationships prefigure all else, the work of Jane Austen is the Rosetta stone of literature.
Anna Quindlen
#51. That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen - fly me!
David Lodge
#52. Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.
Tracy Chevalier
#53. Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.
Florence King
#54. How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!
Dodie Smith
#56. Bridget. Sleeping with a twenty-nine year old off Twitter on the second date is not 'rather like in Jane Austen's day'. (Talitha)
Helen Fielding
#57. The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
Harold Bloom
#58. Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived.
-David Whyte
David Whyte
#59. 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.
Kristan Higgins
#60. Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem.
Ronald Blythe
#61. My very own goth Mr. Darcy. Jane Austen would be so proud.
Gwen Hayes
#62. We may indeed assume, with a high degree of probability, that Jane Austen went commando.
Margaret C. Sullivan
#63. I couldn't exactly blame Jane Austen for being a romantic. What the hell else was there to do back then for fun?
Kristin Walker
#64. I'm jealous of the cherries that have been in your mouth," he said, "that they get to make your lips so red." He kissed her softly, teasing her tongue with his, a lustful wet caress, and Austen was suspended in air. "I'm jealous of every single day before today that I didn't get to spend with you.
C.J. Carlyon
#65. (Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.
Virginia Woolf
#66. What's ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn't they?
Danielle Steel
#67. Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen.
Krista McGee
#68. In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama
Harper Lee
#69. People who say Jane or talk about Janeites revolt me. The sort that can walk with kings and not lose that common touch. 'Miss Austen to you' is what I feel inclined to say.
Angela Thirkell
#70. Couples are really funny, because if they are together, they can fight and do fun things together. In Jane Austen books, marriage is the end of the story, but I actually think a really funny couple could be a fun thing to watch.
Mindy Kaling
#71. Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.
Deanna Raybourn
#72. Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.
Jessica Brown Findlay
#73. Designer clothes, bubblegum pop music, celebrity heartthrobs - I couldn't give a fat rat's hairy ass. Just give me my hotdog and Jane Austen, and I'm good.
Kristin Walker
#74. 'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'
Susanna Clarke
#75. It was all too much. I went to bed for three days, sick like an Austen or a Bronte character who'd foolishly wandered the moors in a storm, with a strong will but weak ankles. Only the moors were my mom's past, and I couldn't find my way.
Heather Brittain Bergstrom
#76. As writers, we should remind ourselves, and each other, that Jane Austen and JK Rowling got rejected by publishers, too.
Joanne Van Leerdam
#77. ...all the great issues in human life make their appearance on Jane Austen's narrow stage. True, it's only the stage of petty domestic circumstance, but that, after all, is the only stage where most of us are likely to meet them.
Ian Watt
#80. Kingsley looked magnificent, like a Regencyera fever dream. If Jane Austen had set eyes on Kingsley, she would never have written her genteel comedies of manner.
She would have written porn.
Tiffany Reisz
#81. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.
Julian Barnes
#82. Let's get this movie started. There's nothing like a little Austen to soothe the wounded soul," Theresa said.
Mary Jane Hathaway
#83. 'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#84. Sence and Sensibility, for instance, came out in three separate volumes, as did Pride and Prejudice (so the next time you read one of the ubiquitous time-travel Austen adaptations and somebody picks up a single-volume first edition, you can hit your nerd buzzer and say "wrong!").
Amy Smith
#85. Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.
Kate Atkinson
#86. Like Wollstonecraft, Austen rejects the notion that 'man was made to reason, woman to feel.' Perhaps Austen was tired of reading passages in conduct books suggesting that young women were innately sensitive, quivering, emotional messes.
Emily Auerbach
#87. Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.
Bertrand Russell
#88. All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
#89. That innovator is the aforementioned Hugh Thomson, who might be called the Colin Firth of Austen-inspired book illustration." (P. 52)
Devoney Looser
#90. Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.
Nancy Kress
#91. Lean on me," someone says in Jane Austen to a woman he scarcely knows, and there's no question but that she will, that she takes it for granted.
Barbara Vine
#92. If you mean Miss Austen, I don't find her particularly romantic," Tasmin declared. "Can't say that I care much about the marriage arrangements among the middle classes."
Tasmin Berrybender
Larry McMurtry
#93. None of my friends knows that most of the sick days I've taken from work are not sick days, but Austen days.
Laurie Viera Rigler
#94. Do not despair, little Alice. Only persist, and thou shalt see, Jane Austen's all in all to thee.
Fay Weldon
#95. Jane Austen, who is said to be Shakespearian, never reminds us of Shakespeare, I think, in her full-dress portraits, but she does so in characters such as Miss Bates and Mrs. Allen.
A. C. Bradley
#96. Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up.
George Sampson
#97. The great thing about Jane Austen - the reason we're all still obsessed with her - is that she gets inside a woman's mind and she taps into our fantasies of wanting to be accepted and loved for who we are.
Jennifer Coolidge
#98. Snobs are only fun in Jane Austen Novels.
Cat Winters
#99. 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.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#100. I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.
Amy Bloom
