Great Quotes:Northanger Abbey (Austen)

"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love." (Chapter 4)
#friendship

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” (Henry Tilney, Chapter 14)
#books

“I read it (history) a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome” (Catherine Morland, chapter 14)
#women

“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.” (Chapter 14)
#women

“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.” Henry Tilney (chapter 14)

#women

“And to marry for money I think the wickedest thing in existence.”  (Catherine Morland, chapter 15)
#marriage

“Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well.”

“Me? Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“Bravo! An excellent satire on modern language.” (Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland, Chapter 16)

“To be always firm must be to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment.” (Henry Tilney, Chapter 16)

“Modesty, and all that, is very well in its way, but really a little common honesty is sometimes quite as becoming. I have no idea of being so overstrained! It is fishing for compliments.” (Isabella Thorpe, Chapter 18)

"You have both of you something, to be sure, but it is not a trifle that will support a family nowadays; and after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money.” (Isabella Thorpe, Chapter 18)

“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.” (Henry Tilney, Chapter 19)

“But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.” (Henry Tilney, Chapter 22)
#happiness

Austen defends novels and reading: 
“And what are you reading, Miss – ?” 
“Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 
“It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; 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.” (Chapter 5)
#books