Quotes About Jane Austen's Books

#1. When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

Mark Twain

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. I was convinced I felt as strongly about Jane Austen's books as Ashleigh had ever felt about any of her crazes, but my love was deep and silent - and therefore easily overshadowed.

Polly Shulman

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

#9. Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Emma Thompson

#10. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

Jane Austen

#11. But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

#12. I should indefinitely prefer a book.

Jane Austen

#13. Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

Jane Austen

#14. 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

#15. I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!
When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Jane Austen

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. I do not pretend to say that I was not very much pleased with him; but while I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.

Jane Austen

#21. And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book.

Jane Austen

#22. 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

#23. The evils arising from the loss of her uncle were neither trifling nor likely to lessen; and when thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past and the present, the employment of mind and dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could produce made her thankfully turn to a book.

Jane Austen

#24. What think you of books?" said he, smiling. "Books - oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.

Jane Austen

#25. 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

#26. I will not allow books to prove any thing."
"But how shall we prove any thing?"
"We never shall.

Jane Austen

#27. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

Jane Austen

#28. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.

Jane Austen

#29. But some characters in books are really real
Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage.

Dodie Smith

#30. I love books; my suitcases are always full of them. Books and shoes. I read when I am sad, when I am happy, when I am nervous. My favourite British author is Jane Austen, and my favourite American one is John O'Hara.

Carolina Herrera

#31. How good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.

Jane Austen

#32. There is no other enjoyment like reading

Jane Austen

#33. She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

E.M. Delafield

#34. Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

Mark Haddon

#35. All books are hyggelig, but classics written by authors such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens have a special place on the bookshelf. At the right age, your kids may also love to cuddle up with you in the hyggekrog and have you read to them. Probably not Tolstoy.

Meik Wiking

#36. He considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet,serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading and sedentary pursuits.

Jane Austen

#37. Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Edward Abbey

#38. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

Jane Austen

#39. No- I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else.

Jane Austen

#40. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

#41. Books
oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same
feelings."
"I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be
no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions.

Jane Austen

#42. How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Jane Austen

#43. But he recommended the books which charmed her leisure hours, he encouraged her taste, and corrected her judgment; he made reading useful by talking to her of what she read, and heightened its attraction by judicious praise.

Jane Austen

#44. With a book he was regardless of time.

Jane Austen

#45. by allowance" and "loving with personal love." This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There

Jane Austen

#46. I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

Laura Marling

#47. And books! ... she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.

Jane Austen

#48. What say you, Mary? for you are a young lady of deep reflection I know, and read great books, and make extracts."
Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.
"While Mary is adjusting her ideas," he continued, "let us return to Mr. Bingley.

Jane Austen

#49. I always find that after reading books written by Jane Austen that I speak much more properly, at least for a while.

Becky Watson