Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Northanger Abbey quotes
16 quotes from Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #121 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 14
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.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 6
A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 16
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.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 19
A distinction to which they had been born gave no pride.
Mr. Allen, who owned the chief of the property about Fullerton, the village in Wiltshire where the Morlands lived, was ordered to Bath for the benefit of a gouty constitution—and his lady, a good-humoured woman, fond of Miss Morland, and probably aware that if adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad, invited her to go with them.
Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 6
Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth; grandeur I detest: I would not settle in London for the universe.
— Isabella · Chapter 15
“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 14
“Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again.”
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 3
It is probable that she will neither love so well, nor flirt so well, as she might do either singly.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 19
Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.
“A mother would have been always present. A mother would have been a constant friend; her influence would have been beyond all other.”
— Spoken by a character · Chapter 22
Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! it does for everything.
— Henry · Chapter 14