Jane Austen Quotes

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

I might as well enquire,” replied she, “why with so evident a design of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even against your character?

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

She was stronger alone…

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own, than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago.

Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.

Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

"How despicably I have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our aquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

Indeed, I am very sorry to be right in this instance. I would much rather have been merry than wise.

She was one of those, who, having, once begun, would be always in love.

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)