A woman of seven and twenty can never hope to inspire affection again.
-Sense and Sensibility

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

I pay very little regard to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
-Mansfield Park

I consider everybody as having a right to marry once in their lives for love, if they can.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1808

Do anything rather than marry without affection.
-Pride and Prejudice

To be so bent on marriage—to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation—is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.
-The Watsons

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.
-Persuasion

...that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite... It is as often applied to feelings which arise from an half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment.
-Pride and Prejudice

...when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
-Northanger Abbey

...why did we wait for any thing? Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
-Emma

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.
-Pride and Prejudice

I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principal duties of both... You will allow that in both, man has the advantage of choice, woman only the power of refusal... that when once entered into, they belong exclusively to each other till the moment of its dissollution... that it is their duty, each to endeavour to give the other no cause for wishing that he or she had bestowed themselves elsewhere.
-Northanger Abbey

Modesty...is very well in its way, but really a little common honesty is sometimes quite as becoming.
-Northanger Abbey

Facts are such horrid things!
-Lady Susan

It is only a novel... or, in short, some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
-Northanger Abbey

You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.
-Letter to her niece Anna (who was writing a book of her own), 1814

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
-Northanger Abbey

At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, "How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!"
-Pride and Prejudice

...but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.
-The Juvenilia of Jane Austen

Of course they had fallen in love over poetry.
-Persuasion

He and I should not in the least agree, of course, in our ideas of novels and heroines;—pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.
-Letter to her niece Fanny, 1817

I begin already to weigh my words & sentences more than I did, & am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the storecloset, it would be charming.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1809

I could no more write a [historical] romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.
-Letter to James Stanier Clarke, The Prince Regent's Librarian, 1816

Oh! The blessing of a female correspondent, when one is really interested in the absent!
-Emma

Expect a most agreeable letter, for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say), I shall have no check to my genius from beginning to end.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1801

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.
-Letter to her niece Fanny, 1817

People always live forever when there is an annuity to be paid them.
-Sense and Sensibility

A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.
-Emma

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
-Mansfield Park

It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.
-Emma

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
-Mansfield Park

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
-Mansfield Park

For what do we live, but to make sport of our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
-Pride and Prejudice

I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
-Pride and Prejudice

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
-Northanger Abbey

Varnish and gilding hide many stains.
-Mansfield Park

A woman can never be too fine while she is all in white.
-Mansfield Park

I bought some Japan ink... & next week shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1798

Now nothing can satisfy me but I must have a straw hat, of the riding hat shape, like Mrs. Tilson's... I am really very shocking; but it will not be dear at a Guinea.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1811

My cloak came on Tuesday, & tho' I expected a good deal, the beauty of the lace astonished me. It is too handsome to be worn, almost too handsome to be looked at.
-Letter to Cassandra, 1800

It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.
-Northanger Abbey

Your sentiments so nobly expressed on the different excellencies of Indian & English muslins, & the judicious preference you give the former, have excited in me an admiration of which I can alone give an adequate idea, by assuring you that it is nearly equal to what I feel for myself.
-The Juvenilia of Jane Austen (Frederic and Elfrida)

To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
-Mansfield Park

A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
-Northanger Abbey

I was therefore entered at Oxford and have been properly idle ever since.
-Sense and Sensibility

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

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
-Emma

In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
-Northanger Abbey

If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.
-Persuasion

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
-Emma

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
-Pride and Prejudice

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
-Emma

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
-Mansfield Park

What wild imaginations one forms, where dear self is concerned!
-Persuasion

Those who tell their own story, you know, must be listened to with caution.
-Sanditon