The Jane Austen Society
Natalie Jenner
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion.”
“But one can always read Austen.”
“We love Jane Austen because her characters, as sparkling as they are, are no better and no worse than us. They’re so eminently, so completely, human. I, for one, find it greatly consoling that she had us all figured out.”
“And, yes, sadly, no one else can ever understand your loss. It belongs to you. It impacts only you. And guess what? They don’t need to understand.” Mimi paused. “But you do. You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them.”
“He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to—whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him—a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably.”
“During the Great War, shell-shocked soldiers had been encouraged to read Jane Austen in particular—Kipling had coped with the loss of his soldier son by reading her books aloud to his family each night—Winston Churchill had recently used them to get through the Second World War.”
“Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure—of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end.”
“Because—and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this—inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world.”
“some of us are given too much to bear, and this burden is made worse by the hidden nature of that toll, a toll that others cannot even begin to guess at.”
“The humanity—the love for people—mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.”
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Book Keywords:
rebel-reader, saved-by-jane-austen
