Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

"I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible."

"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."

"[I]t is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible."

"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."

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

"It is only a novel... or, in short, 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"

"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."

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