Browse 7 quotations connecting Jane Austen with Funny, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey.
“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
The line is comic rather than literal advice, using exaggeration to expose how readily people excuse entrenched self-interest.
Source note: Mary Crawford makes the remark while discussing motives and conduct in company.
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
The playful exaggeration defends pleasure in fiction and pushes back against the idea that reading novels is an intellectually inferior pastime.
Source note: Northanger Abbey, in Henry Tilney’s conversation about reading novels.
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”
The line is memorable as praise of reading, though its comic context matters because Miss Bingley says it while performing interest for Darcy.
Source note: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 11; context is ironic.
“I am not a great reader, and have pleasure in many things.”
Elizabeth lightly rejects the performance of bookish superiority, keeping reading in proportion to a broader and more independent personality.
Source note: Pride and Prejudice; Elizabeth answers a conversation in which reading is being used as a social signal.
“I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends.”
Mr. Bennet turns Mrs. Bennet’s recurring complaint into dry affection, using understatement to expose a long-established family pattern.
Source note: Pride and Prejudice, Volume 1, Chapter 1; Mr. Bennet responds to his wife’s complaint about her nerves.
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
Mr. Bennet’s joke treats social observation as reciprocal: everyone is somebody else’s entertainment, including the people doing the laughing.
Source note: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 57; Mr. Bennet comments on the absurd rumour concerning Elizabeth and Darcy.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
The famous opening exposes assumptions about money, marriage, and social expectations while sounding as if it were stating an unquestionable fact.
Source note: Opening sentence of Chapter 1; the narrator immediately signals the novel’s social irony.