On this day in 1775, one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Jane Austen, was born.
In celebration of the great lady’s birthday, here are some excerpts from her novels:
From Sense & Sensibility:
“They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future.”
From Pride & Prejudice:
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
From Mansfield Park:
- “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.“
- From Northanger Abbey:
- “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
- From Emma:
- “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”