Northanger Abbey

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

“Beware how you give your heart.”

“But there are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power.”

“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from?”

“Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”

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

“His cruelty to such a charming woman made him odious to her. She had often read of such characters.”

“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.”

“I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true.”

“I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.”

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“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.”

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

“If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”

“If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.”

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

“It requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.”

“It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.”

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.”

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

“Oh! it is only a novel! Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

“Oh! that arch eye of yours! It sees through every thing.”

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

“The Abbey in itself was no more to her now than any other house. The painful remembrance of the folly it had helped to nourish and perfect, was the only emotion which could spring from a consideration of the building.”

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

“The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom.”

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

“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.”

“To be disgraced in the eye of the world, to wear the appearance of infamy while her heart is all purity, her actions all innocence, and the misconduct of another the true source of her debasement, is one of those circumstances which peculiarly belong to the heroine’s life, and her fortitude under it what particularly dignifies her character.”

“We must live and learn.”

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

“Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.”

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

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