Jane Austen Letters Quotes & Sayings

What a good-for-nothing-fellow Charles is to bespeak the stockings - I hope he will be too hot all the rest of his life for it! - — Jane Austen

Letters are no matter of indifference; they are generally a very positive curse. — Jane Austen

She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced. — Jane Austen

To Miss Cooper
Cousin,
Conscious of the Charming Character which in every Country, and every Clime in Christendom is Cried, Concerning you, with Caution and Care I Commend to your Charitable Criticism this Clever Collection of Curious Comments, which have been Carefully Culled, Collected and Classed by your Comical Cousin
The Author — Jane Austen

Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up. — George Sampson

Elizabeth had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a letter from Jane on their first arrival at Lambton; and this disappointment had been renewed on each of the mornings that had now been spent there; but on the third her repining was over, and her sister justified, by the receipt of two letters from her at once, on one of which was marked that it had been missent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it, as Jane had written the direction remarkably ill. — Jane Austen

Do not despair, little Alice. Only persist, and thou shalt see, Jane Austen's all in all to thee. — Fay Weldon

As for Elizabeth Bennet, our chief reason for accepting her point of view as a reflection of her author's is the impression that she bears of sympathy between them
an impression of which almost every reader would be sensible, even if it had not the explicit confirmation of Jane Austen's letters. Yet, as she is presented to us in Pride and Prejudice, she is but a partial and sometimes perverse observer. — Mary Lascelles

The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for. — Jane Austen

My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them--by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents. — Jane Austen

... but her Letters were always unsatisfactory, and though she did not openly avow her feelings, yet every line proved her to be Unhappy. — Jane Austen

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words. — Jane Austen

If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic. — Chris Bohjalian

You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve. — Jane Austen

Every body allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. — Jane Austen

She ventured to recommend a larger allowance of prose in his daily study; and on being requested to particularise, mentioned such works by our best moralists, such collections of fine letters, such memoirs of characters of worth and suffering, as occurred to her at the moment as calculated to rouse and fortify the mind. — Jane Austen

Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.
Jane Austen's Letters August 1796 — Jane Austen