Northanger Abbey Quotes

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone.

I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.

From fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.

If a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.

Wherever you are you should always be contented, but especially at home, because there you must spend the most of your time.

Now I must give one smirk and then we may be rational again.

A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief

What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.

It is so delightful to have an evening now and then to oneself.

“Beware how you give your heart.”

No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of any body else.

And from the whole she deduced this useful lesson, that to go previously engaged to a ball, does not necessarily increase either the dignity or enjoyment of a young lady.

I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

“But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

“If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”

If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.

As for admiration, it was always very welcome when it came, but she did not depend on it.

Strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out.

She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.