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Overview
Have you ever wanted to contribute to a discussion with an astute observation on unrequited love? Give advice to a peer on how to dress for a night out? Or end an argument with a biting quip on feminist politics? The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Jane Austen is the perfect pocket book to carry around in your bag as you meditate on Austen’s surprisingly modern and perceptive life philosophies set against the backdrop of eighteenth century mores. Discover what she had to say about style and dress, men and women, love and heartbreak, keeping up with appearances, arts and graces, health and happiness, and more, and stock up your arsenal of wicked and practical wisdoms as you navigate life.
Beautifully designed and curated, this entertaining collection compiles the wisest and wittiest Austen quotations that speak of the novelist’s enduring legacy in contemporary pop culture. Full of sense and sensibility, The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Jane Austen is sure to delight devoted fans and casual readers alike.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510715844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2017 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
It was a splendid sight, and she began , for the first time that evening, to feel herself at a ball: she longed to dance, but she had not an acquaintance in the room.
OF CATHERINE MORLAND, NORTHANGER ABBEY
'There is a fine old saying, which everybody here is of course familiar with: "Keep your breath to cool your porridge"; and I shall keep mine to swell my song.'
ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'The little Durands were there, I conclude ... with their mouths open to catch the music, like unfledged sparrows ready to be fed.'
MRS SMITH, PERSUASION
* * *
'There are some people who cannot bear a party of pleasure.'
MR WILLOUGHBY, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
'My fingers ... do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault – because I will not take the trouble of practising.'
ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?' 'Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together; and yet for the advantage of some, conversation ought to be so arranged as that they may have the trouble of saying as little as possible.'
MR DARCY AND ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'Matrimony and dancing ... in both, man has the advantage of choice, women only the power of refusal.'
HENRY TILNEY, NORTHANGER ABBEY
' People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.'
CATHERINE MORLAND, NORTHANGER ABBEY
'Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you for being simply dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved.'
MR COLLINS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'One man's style must not be the rule of another's.'
MR KNIGHTLEY, EMMA
* * *
He was a stout young man of middling height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.
OF JOHN THORPE, NORTHANGER ABBEY
You really must get some flounces .
LETTER TO CASSANDRA
'You are never sure of a good impression being durable.'
CAPTAIN WENTWORTH, PERSUASION
* * *
'A simple style of dress is so infinitely preferable to finery ... few people seem to value simplicity of dress – show and finery are everything.'
MRS ELTON, EMMA
* * *
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
'Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it.'
MR KNIGHTLEY ON EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
To be in company, nicely dressed herself and seeing others nicely dressed, to sit and smile and look pretty, and say nothing, was enough for the happiness of the present hour.
EMMA
* * *
Dress was her passion. She had a most harmless delight in being fine.
OF MRS ALLEN, NORTHANGER ABBEY
* * *
'A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.'
MARY BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'Nobody can think less of dress in general than I do – but upon such an occasion as this, when every body's eyes are so much upon me, and in compliment to the Westons – who I have no doubt are giving this ball chiefly to do me honour – I would not wish to be inferior to others. And I see very few pearls in the room except mine.'
MRS ELTON, EMMA
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; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.
LETTER TO CASSANDRA
Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
The Miss Dashwoods were young, pretty, and unaffected . It was enough to secure his good opinion; for to be unaffected was all that a pretty girl could want to make her mind as captivating as her person .
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
'If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.'
MARY MUSGROVE, PERSUASION
* * *
'Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction, I am sure it will.'
EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
* * *
There certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.
MANSFIELD PARK
'Nothing but love, flirtation, and officers have been in her head.'
ELIZABETH BENNET ON LYDIA BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you.'
ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'I think very highly of the understanding of all the women in the world – especially of those – whoever they may be – with whom I happen to be in company.'
HENRY TILNEY, NORTHANGER ABBEY
* * *
'Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments.'
ANNE ELLIOT, PERSUASION
He was exactly formed to engage Marianne's heart.
OF MR WILLOUGHBY, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
* * *
'He is also handsome ... which a young man ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby complete.'
ELIZABETH BENNET ON MR BINGLEY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
His air as he walked by the house – the very sitting of his hat, being all in proof of how much he was in love!
OF MR ELTON, EMMA
'He must be in love with you, or he would never have called us in this familiar way.'
CHARLOTTE LUCAS ON MR DARCY, 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
* * *
'I have never yet found that the advice of a sister could prevent a young man's being in love if he chose.'
LADY SUSAN VERNON, LADY SUSAN
* * *
'You are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking ... I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire.'
MR DARCY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not.'
CAPTAIN FREDERICK WENTWORTH, PERSUASION
'What are young men to rocks and mountains?'
ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.'
ADMIRAL CROFT, PERSUASION
* * *
Handsome is as handsome does.
LETTER TO CASSANDRA
'All the privilege I claim for my own sex ... is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.'
ANNE ELLIOT, PERSUASION
'He thoroughly knows his own mind, and acts up to his resolutions: an inestimable quality.'
EDMUND BERTRAM, MANSFIELD PARK
* * *
She attracted him more than he liked ... He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him.
OF MR DARCY'S ATTEMPTS TO HIDE HIS ATTRACTION TO ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.
PERSUASION
'Handsome young men must have something to live on as well as the plain.'
ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.'
HENRY TILNEY, NORTHANGER ABBEY
'I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.'
ELINOR DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
She began to now comprehend that he was exactly the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her.
ELIZABETH BENNET, OF MR DARCY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
'At his own ball he offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to dance; and I spoke to him twice myself, without receiving an answer. Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?'
ELIZABETH BENNET ON MR BINGLEY'S ATTENTION TO JANE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'I assure you it was a great compliment if he was [in love with Marianne], for he hardly ever falls in love with any body.'
MRS PALMER ON COLONEL BRANDON, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
'There does seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love exactly the right direction, and sends it to the very channel where it ought to flow.'
EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
'If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.'
* * *
MARIANNE DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
* * *
But 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
* * *
'I suppose there may be a hundred different ways of being in love.'
EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
'It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object.'
MR KNIGHTLEY ON EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
'The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.'
HENRY TILNEY, NORTHANGER ABBEY
'The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!'
MARIANNE DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
* * *
'I am quite enough in love.'
EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
The anxieties of common life began soon to succeed to the alarms of romance.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
She had begun to think he really loved her, and to fancy his affection for her something more than common.
FANNY PRICE'S ASSESSMENT OF MR CRAWFORD, MANSFIELD PARK
* * *
Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.
NORTHANGER ABBEY
* * *
'We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of a man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.'
MR BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not – for a few weeks at least .'
EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
'The very first moment I beheld him – my heart was irrecoverably gone.'
ISABELLA THORPE ON JAMES MORLAND, NORTHANGER ABBEY
* * *
'My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.'
MR DARCY TO ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'We all have our best guides within us, if only we would listen.'
FANNY PRICE, MANSFIELD PARK
'I could not think about you so much without doting on you, faults and all .'
MR KNIGHTLEY TO EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.
OF MR DARCY'S FEELINGS TOWARDS ELIZABETH BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'Very long has it possessed a charm over my fancy; and, if I dared, I would breathe my wishes that the name might never change.'
WILLIAM ELLIOT, PERSUASION
'Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld!'
MR BINGLEY ON JANE BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'I could not reason so to a man in love.'
MR KNIGHTLEY, EMMA
* * *
'Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.'
MR BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
* * *
'Sense will always have attractions for me.'
ELINOR DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
'I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature.'
ISABELLA THORPE, NORTHANGER ABBEY
She had talked her into love; but, alas! she was not so easily to be talked out of it.
EMMA'S THOUGHTS ON HARRIET'S UNSUITABLE SUITOR, EMMA
'To be sure, you knew no actual good of me – but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.'
ELIZABETH BENNET TO MR DARCY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'Upon my word, I never saw a young woman so desperately in love in my life!'
MRS JENNINGS ON MARIANNE DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
'You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because you are warned against it.'
MRS GARDINER, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'I feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.'
MRS DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY'Risk anything rather than her displeasure.'
MR BENNET, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
'In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.'
CHARLOTTE LUCAS, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
MANSFIELD PARK
He expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
A young woman in love always looks – 'like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief.'
NORTHANGER ABBEY
Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her.
OF ELIZABETH BENNET'S FEELINGS TOWARDS MR DARCY, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
[She] was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love.
OF HARRIET SMITH, EMMA
'That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.'
MARIANNE DASHWOOD, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Mrs Goddard was the mistress of a School ... a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies.
EMMA
* * *
'A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved.'
CAROLINE BINGLEY ON BEING ACCOMPLISHED, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
She was not much deceived as to her own skill either as an artist or a musician, but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.
OF EMMA WOODHOUSE, EMMA
'I am afraid, Mama, he has no real taste. Music seems scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor's drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person who can understand their worth.'
MARIANNE DASHWOOD ON EDWARD FERRARS, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
* * *
So far her improvement was sufficient – and in many other points she came on exceedingly well; for though she could not write sonnets, she brought herself to read them; and though there seemed no chance of her throwing a whole party into raptures by a prelude on the pianoforte, of her own composition, she could listen to other people's performance with very little fatigue.
OF CATHERINE MORLAND, NORTHANGER ABBEY
'Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.'
MISS CRAWFORD, MANSFIELD PARK
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Smart Words and Wicked Wit of Jane Austen"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
A Song and Dance,
Style and Dress,
Men and Women,
Matters of the Heart,
Arts and Graces,
Little Rubs,
Misplaced Love and Heartbreak,
The Happy Occasion,
Good Company,
On Philosophy,
Keeping up Appearances,
Health and Happiness,
Witty Quips,