“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!”

— Dodie Smith, book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Dodie Smith49

English novelist and playwright 1896–1990

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“Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

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“Thank you very much. Good Heavens. Um, I can't thank you enough, Hollywood Foreign Press, for honouring me in this capacity. I don't wish to burden you with my debts, which are heavy and numerous but, um, I think that everybody involved in the making of this film knows that we owe all our pride and all our joy to the genius of Jane Austen. And, um, it occurred to me to wonder how she would react to an evening like this… [Puts down statue on stage, reads paper] This is what I came up with”

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“God knows how ardently I wish I had ten lives”

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“Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.”

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Source: The Jane Austen Book Club

“Most works in realism tell a succession of such abject truths; they are deeply in earnest, every detail is true, and yet the whole finally tumbles to the ground — true but without significance. How did Jane Austen save her novels from that danger? They appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with R. Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Elliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Thornton Wilder, A preface for Our Town (1938)

“I wish to believe in immortality-I wish to live with you forever.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

“I have retired to Nemours to work upon a novel called The Age for Love, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, my dear master.”

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“I also believe that Spinoza, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, on whose lives and philosophy I have based two earlier novels, wrote much that is highly relevant to my field of psychiatry and psychotherapy—for example, that ideas, thoughts, and feelings are caused by previous experiences, that passions may be studied dispassionately, that understanding leads to transcendence—and I wished to celebrate his contributions through a novel of ideas.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Irvin D. Yalom, in his novel The Spinoza Problem, prologue. (New York: Basic Books, 2012)
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