I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!- Elizabeth Bennet

The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing

A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite as leisure.

To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of 26 and 18 is to do pretty well.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex ... is that of loving longest, when existence or hope is gone.