Jenny Rowland > Jenny's Quotes

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“It's a curious, wanting thing.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“I felt that thread that had come between us, tugging, tugging at my heart - so hard, it hurt me. A hundred times I almost rose, almost went in to her; a hundred times I thought, Go to her! Why are you waiting? Go back to her side! But every time, I thought of what would happen if I did. I knew that I couldn't lie beside her, without wanting to touch her. I couldn't have felt her breath upon my mouth, without wanting to kiss her. And I couldn't have kissed her, without wanting to save her.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“Being in love, you know... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.”
― Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

“Why is it we can never love the people we ought to?”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“Respect your characters, even the ­minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's.”
― Sarah Waters

“Why do gentlemen's voices carry so clearly, when women's are so easily stifled?”
― Sarah Waters, Affinity

“Even ashes are a part of your freedom.”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

“She supposed that houses, after all - like the lives that were lived in them - were mostly made of space. It was the spaces, in fact, which counted, rather than the bricks.”
― Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

“We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a thing so very sweet. Nor, in my gladness, could I quite believe that anybody would be anything but happy for me if only they knew.”
― Sarah Waters, Tipping the Velvet

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
― Jane Austen, Pride And Prejudice

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!”
― Jane Austen, Love and Freindship

“The distance is nothing when one has a motive.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“He will make you happy, Fanny; I know he will make you happy; but you will make him everything.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“I was so anxious to do what is right that I forgot to do what is right.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Fanny! You are killing me!"
"No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“The sound of the pages turning was the sound of magic. The dry liquid feel of paper under fingertips was what magic felt like.”
― Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

“And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.”
― Emma Donoghue, Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins