Jane Austen

"I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love! ... Every thing nourishes what is strong already. But if it only be a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.""

"You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged."

"If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it... This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree. I had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every particular, but I must so far differ from you as to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly foolish."

She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.

But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express theml by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.

"The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance."

"Your conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was more agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow."

Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley's attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware; to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.

".... for she is very ill indeed, and suffers a vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is always the way with her, for she has, without exception, the sweetest temper I ever met with."