Jane Austen
Quotes
I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness.
The pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
Yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.
I suppose you know, ma'am, that Mr. Ferrars is married.
No sooner was his father's funeral over, than Mrs John Dashwood [...] arrived with her child and their attendants.
There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them; and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour, and a general want of understanding.
Nothing gave any symptom of that indigence [...] – no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared – but there, the deficiency was considerable.
Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby.
His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.
Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy.
Fortunately for those who pay their court through such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing...
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
