“To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

“Jane clutched her mug like a talisman of reality.”

“All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.”

“Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.”

“It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.”

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

“Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles.”

“Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.”

“you'll see, jane,' he promised her. 'you'll forget me, and it won't hurt tomorrow. besides, you said it yourself: love means you cαn never be apart. so we'll never be apart, jane, becαuse i love you so much. i'll always, always love you.”

“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah.”