Austen Quotes

• I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

  Mark Twain

  Hate, Book, Writing

  53 Copy quote

• 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

  Excitement, Week, Heroines

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.33, Lulu Press, Inc

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

  Mark Twain

  Art, Book, Beer

  "Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World". Volume II,

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• They're always such alive females. And also, all those love stories - no man in Austen has ever fallen in love with a female heroine because she's pretty or beautiful or has long, blonde hair. They fall in love with them because of who they are, because of their vibrancy and their intelligence and if only we were teaching that a bit more in schools.

  Anna Maxwell Martin

  Beautiful, Falling In Love, Teaching

  45 Copy quote

• Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Views, Female, Point Of View

  4 Copy quote

• It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Writing, Important, Bothered

  Karen Joy Fowler (2005). “The Jane Austen Book Club”, p.102, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Art, Order, Fiction

  Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee (2000). “A room of one's own and other essays”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

  Terry Pratchett

  Novel, Clothings, Jane

  4 Copy quote

• How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

  Dodie Smith

  Wish, Novel, Jane

  Dodie Smith (2011). “I Capture The Castle”, p.30, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone.

  Mary Ann Shaffer

  Good Enough, Be Good, Ought

  Annie Barrows, Mary Ann Shaffer (2011). “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle Deluxe Reading Group Edition): A Novel”, p.274, Dial Press

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

  Ian Mcewan

  Reading, Book, Home

  4 Copy quote

• All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Sublime, Jane

  4 Copy quote

• You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Dream, Business

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Discovery, Play, Would Be

  4 Copy quote

• Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world.

  Gugu Mbatha-Raw

  Drama, World, Periods

  Source: aalbc.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Jane

  4 Copy quote

• [ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

  Whit Stillman

  Years, People, Projects

  Source: newrepublic.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well, I'm drawn to stuff that is darker. I will probably do a version of Jane Austen at some point because her books are really well known. Unfortunately they've been parodied to death, but they're so well known that I feel like I should approach it and I think I have an idea that will definitely spin it in a different way. There's melancholy and sadness around the edges. I haven't read all of her books, but it seems they often have... essentially happy endings?

  Robert Sikoryak

  Book, Sadness, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I came to England it wasn't what it is now, then the black people were very rarely strong. I had a personal shock because England wasn't what I expected it to be... where people lived like Jane Austen.

  Buchi Emecheta

  Strong, People, Black

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, Who We Are, Fantasy

  Source: www.discdish.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• [On Austen Chamberlain:] He is more loyal to his friends than to his convictions.

  Margot Asquith

  Loyal, Politician, Conviction

  6 Copy quote

• Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

  Jane Gardam

  Book, Men, Two

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Keys, Pieces

  Roger Ebert (2009). “Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2009”, p.46, Andrews McMeel Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I first thought about becoming Jane Austen I had to forget about the fear, or at least choose something else to focus on because it was becoming paralysing, I couldn't focus. I felt frightened, not so much by her fans' reaction to my performance but that I would be playing someone who I think is a legend, who I respect and admire so much. I didn't want to fail, so I was putting a lot of pressure on myself.

  Anne Hathaway

  Thinking, Focus, Fans

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Animal, Men, Doe

  4 Copy quote