Quotes by Jane Austen

...it is very well worth while to be tormented for two or three years of ones life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider - if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain - or perhaps might not have written at all.

She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

It is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering, as it always does of our conduct.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

Time will explain.

Time did not compose her.

Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.

I frequently observe that one pretty face would be followed by five and thirty frights.

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.

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

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

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

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

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

With a book he was regardless of time.

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.

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.