#austen

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. ... All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with? ... Suicide is more respectable. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#life

To a good man, yes, one who knows her in all her moods, who can laugh at her follies and rejoice in her virtues; who will not allow her to give in to her worst instincts; one who knows her, and who, knowing her, will still love her, and love her as she should be loved. ↗

— Amanda Grange

#love

Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. ↗

— Jane Austen

#money #sense-and-sensibility #money

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me. ↗

— Emma Thompson

#books #jane-austen #language #movies #screenplays

I knew it was Peter playing. I fancied he was trying to tell me something - an absurd idea, but it persisted - 'I may not be able to spell, but just you listen to this. ↗

— Jennifer Paynter

#embarrassment #jane-austen #jennifer-paynter #love #mary-bennet

He is blinded and nothing will open his eyes,nothing can,after having had truths so long before him in vain.--He will marry her and poor and miserable.God grant that her influence do not make him cease to be respectable!"---She looked over the letter again."So very fond of me!tis"nonsense all.She loves nobody but herself and her brother.Her friends leading her astray for years!She is quite as likely to have led them astray. They have all,perhaps, been corrupting one another;but if they are so much fonder of her than she is of them,she is the less likely to have been hurt except by their flattery.The only woman in the world,whom he could ever think of as a wife.....I firmly believe it.It is an attachment to govern his whole life. Accepted or refused,his heart is wedded to her for ever.The loss of Mary,I must consider as comprehending the loss of Crawford and Fanny.Edmund you do not know me.The families would never be connected,if you did not connected them. Oh!write,write.Finish it at once.Let there be an end of this suspense.Fix, commit,condemn yourself."-Fanny Price ↗

— Jane Austen

#jane-austen #mansfield-park #family

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#begins #end #jane #jane austen #line

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me. ↗

— Anna Quindlen

#change

I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin's age. ↗

— Jane Austen

#humor #jane #persuasion #sea #sir-walter

I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knightley is a man in a million. She's temporarily silly, yet all the time one knows she's basically intelligent. Creative, determined to set the highest standards. A real human being. ↗

— John Fowles

#intelligence #jane-austen #mr-knightley #snobbery #intelligence