Quotes on Books & Reading
Austen wrote for readers and about them. Her characters are judged, reliably, by how and what they read — Caroline Bingley performs reading to impress a man, Catherine Morland over-trusts her Gothic novels, Henry Tilney reads everything and apologizes for none of it. And in Northanger Abbey's fifth chapter she set down the most spirited defence of the novel ever written by a novelist, at a time when the form was still widely dismissed as frivolous or even morally suspect, especially for women readers. That defense wasn't an abstract literary argument for Austen — her own heroines' capacity for self-deception and self-correction depends on how carefully (or carelessly) they read the people and situations around them, treating interpretation itself as a skill her characters either have or have to learn. A novel about a heroine who reads badly, like Catherine Morland, is also a novel arguing for reading well.
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
“I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.”
“In short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature... are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
“There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”