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No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine... But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.
Jane Austen -
I have not a doubt of your doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on; so easy, that every servant will cheat you; and so generous, that you will always exceed your income.
Jane Austen
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Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who married him cannot have a proper way of thinking.
Jane Austen -
I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error.
Jane Austen -
The post-office is a wonderful establishment! The regularity and dispatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!
Jane Austen -
We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.
Jane Austen -
You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.
Jane Austen -
...the Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son, and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year.
Jane Austen
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Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
Jane Austen -
I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.
Jane Austen -
I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.
Jane Austen -
I believe you [men] capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as - if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. 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 -
There were several Battles between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, in which the former (as they ought) usually won.
Jane Austen -
I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
Jane Austen
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There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.
Jane Austen -
Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.
Jane Austen -
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.
Jane Austen -
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.
Jane Austen -
It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.
Jane Austen -
Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.
Jane Austen
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...my courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.
Jane Austen -
Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness.
Jane Austen -
I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.
Jane Austen -
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
Jane Austen