Jane Austen

“Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.”

“Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.”

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

“There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.”

“Pride,’ observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, ‘is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.”

“Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.”

“It has sunk him, I cannot say how much it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be!-None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that distain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.”

“One man's style must not be the rule of another's.”

“It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.”

“Every line, every word was -- in the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer, were she here, would forbid -- a dagger to my heart. To know that Marianne was in town was -- in the same language -- a thunderbolt. -- Thunderbolts and daggers! -- what a reproof would she have given me! -- her taste, her opinions -- I believe they are better known to me than my own, -- and I am sure they are dearer.”

“You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.  Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of which without her is abhorrent.  You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world.  You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficult, you could rely on.”

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

“It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.”

“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”

“They all went indoors with their new friends, and found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.”

“It was gratitude; gratitude, not merelyfor having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him.”

“Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness.”~ Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice)”

“Yet some happiness must and would arise, from the very conviction, that he did suffer.”

“She had received ideas which disposed her to be courteous and kind to all, and to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.”

“She wished such words unsaid with all her heart”