Jane Austen: Trending quotes (page 16)

“if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him. If she can hesitate as to `Yes,' she ought to say `No' directly. It is not a state to be safely entered into with doubtful feelings, with half a heart.”

“Maybe it’s that I find it hard to forgive the follies and vices of others, or their offenses against me. My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.”

“My idea of good company, Mr. Eliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

“The one claim I shall make for my own sex is that we love longest, when all hope is gone.”

“She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.”

“Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.”

“Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?”

“And you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner.”

“Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.”

“There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.”

“You have bewitched me body and soul.”

“I am all astonishment.”

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

“If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.”

“We can all begin freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.”

“What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”

“This is an evening of wonders, indeed!”

“And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.”

“She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.”