“I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“My idea of good company...is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.'
'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."
"Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn--that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness--that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“She understood him. He could not forgive her,-but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjest resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impuse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy, (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples) there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so simliar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become aquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“The last few hours were certainly very painful," replied Anne: "but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
“I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”
― Jane Austen, quote from Persuasion
Jane Austen
Born place: in Steventon Rectory, Hampshire, England
Born date December 16, 1775
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“You go out into your world, and try and find the things that will be useful to you. Your weapons. Your tools. Your charms. You find a record, or a poem, or a picture of a girl that you pin to the wall and go, "Her. I'll try and be her. I'll try and be her - but here." You observe the way others walk, and talk, and you steal little bits of them - you collage yourself out of whatever you can get your hands on. You are like the robot Johnny 5 in Short Circuit, crying, "More input! More input for Johnny 5! as you rifle through books and watch films and sit in front of the television, trying to guess which of these things that you are watching - Alexis Carrington Colby walking down a marble staircase; Anne of Green Gables holding her shoddy suitcase; Cathy wailing on the moors; Courtney Love wailing in her petticoat; Dorothy Parker gunning people down; Grace Jones singing "Slave to the Rhythm" - you will need when you get out there. What will be useful. What will be, eventually, you?
And you will be quite on your own when you do all this. There is no academy where you can learn to be yourself; there is no line manager slowly urging you toward the correct answer. You are midwife to yourself, and will give birth to yourself, over and over, in dark rooms, alone.
And some versions of you will end in dismal failure - many prototypes won't even get out the front door, as you suddenly realize that no, you can't style-out an all-in-one gold bodysuit and a massive attitude problem in Wolverhampton. Others will achieve temporary success - hitting new land-speed records, and amazing all around you, and then suddenly, unexpectedly exploding, like the Bluebird on Coniston Water.
But one day you'll find a version of you that will get you kissed, or befriended, or inspired, and you will make your notes accordingly, staying up all night to hone and improvise upon a tiny snatch of melody that worked.
Until - slowly, slowly - you make a viable version of you, one you can hum every day. You'll find the tiny, right piece of grit you can pearl around, until nature kicks in, and your shell will just quietly fill with magic, even while you're busy doing other things. What your nature began, nature will take over, and start completing, until you stop having to think about who you'll be entirely - as you're too busy doing, now. And ten years will pass without you even noticing.
And later, over a glass of wine - because you drink wine now, because you are grown - you will marvel over what you did. Marvel that, at the time, you kept so many secrets. Tried to keep the secret of yourself. Tried to metamorphose in the dark. The loud, drunken, fucking, eyeliner-smeared, laughing, cutting, panicking, unbearably present secret of yourself. When really you were about as secret as the moon. And as luminous, under all those clothes.”
― Caitlin Moran, quote from How to Build a Girl
“He preferred her barefoot, he said. She had such lovely feet. Roza didn’t agree. What was lovely about feet that could not take you anywhere? What was lovely about feet that could not run?”
― Laura Ruby, quote from Bone Gap
“Looking at her, he could almost see the painted serpent squirming on her skin, ready to turn, mouth open.”
― Megan Abbott, quote from The Fever
“In what world is Armani here seventeen?” Cristiano shrugged unapologetically. “They feed us better in Italy.”
― A.E. Kirk, quote from Demons in Disguise
“the simple fact of bearing a responsibility can be something that gives meaning to life.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, quote from Little Star
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