1,664 Quotes by Jane Austen

Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.

These matters are always a secret, till it is found out that every body knows them.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable.

Then, with the gladness which must be felt, nay, which he did not scruple to feel, having never believed Frank Churchill to be at all deserving Emma, was there so much fond solicitude, so much keen anxiety for her, that he could stay no longer. He had ridden home through the rain; and had walked up directly after dinner, to see how this sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults, bore the discovery.

I am worn out with civility. I have been talking incessantly all night with nothing to say.

It was gratitude; gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection.

And now I may dismiss my heroine to the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine's portion - to a pillow strewed with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get another good night's rest in the course of the next three months.

With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing — for she had done mischief.