Top 100 Quotes About Jane Austen
#1. I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.
Val McDermid
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. My very own goth Mr. Darcy. Jane Austen would be so proud.
Gwen Hayes
#6. We may indeed assume, with a high degree of probability, that Jane Austen went commando.
Margaret C. Sullivan
#7. 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
#8. (Jane Austen) is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.
Virginia Woolf
#9. What's ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn't they?
Danielle Steel
#10. 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
#11. In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama
Harper Lee
#12. 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
#13. Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen.
Deanna Raybourn
#14. 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
#15. 'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'
Susanna Clarke
#16. As writers, we should remind ourselves, and each other, that Jane Austen and JK Rowling got rejected by publishers, too.
Joanne Van Leerdam
#17. ...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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#23. The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
Harold Bloom
#24. As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.
Philip Pullman
#25. JANE AUSTEN was born in 1775 in the village of Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of an Anglican clergyman. The
Jane Austen
#26. The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
Simon Schama
#27. 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
#28. Jane Austen had it wrong, Sloan McKinley thought miserably as the black Lincoln Town Car drove her ever closer to the bright lights of the George Washington Bridge and the Manhattan streets she called home. A man in possession of a good fortune only wanted to get laid.
Addison Fox
#29. Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?
Virginia Woolf
#30. 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.'
Lauren Willig
#31. 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.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#32. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that ...
Virginia Woolf
#33. Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative.
Meg Cabot
#34. I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries.
Julie Walters
#35. 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
#36. Snobs are only fun in Jane Austen Novels.
Cat Winters
#37. 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
#38. Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up.
George Sampson
#39. 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
#40. Do not despair, little Alice. Only persist, and thou shalt see, Jane Austen's all in all to thee.
Fay Weldon
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#48. How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!
Dodie Smith
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing of the thoughts of their characters.
Mary Lascelles
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
A. N. Wilson
#57. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
J.K. Rowling
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. To Jane Austen, for making romance novels classics and keepers for generations.
Mary Balogh
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove.
Mason Cooley
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. [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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
#85. [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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.
Gurinder Chadha
#89. 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
#90. Jane Austen has taught me to view the ridiculous and rude with amusement rather than disdain.
Natalie Tyler
#91. 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
#92. Jane Austen's work was my first experience of grown-up literature, and has supplied a lifetime of pleasure: it's the only book that, as an adult, I re-read.
Jo Baker
#93. [Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work.
Agnieszka Holland
#94. 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.
Margaret Drabble
#95. 'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.
Cathleen Schine
#96. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering."
(Jane Austen)
Jane Austen
#97. [On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.
Rebecca West
#98. I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.
Claire Tomalin
#99. [Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.
Denis Dutton
#100. 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.
Emma Donoghue
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