Jane Austen

People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.

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.

In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

"Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."

-Elinor Dashwood

It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.

Heaven forbid! — That would be the greatest misfortune of all! — To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! — Do not wish me such an evil.

The distance is nothing when one has a motive.

Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.
And men take care that they should.

The most incomprehensible thing in the world to a man, is a woman who rejects his offer of marriage!

You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.

[N]obody minds having what is too good for them.

Elizabeth's spirit's soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. 'How could you begin?' said she.
'I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?' '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.