Top 40 Lauren Willig Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.”

— Lauren Willig

2. “Old books exert a strange fascination for me – their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.”

— Lauren Willig

3. “When you think about it, everything has been said before, in one way or another. It’s only our experience of it that makes it new.”

— Lauren Willig

4. “It was lovely to see cynicism in one so young. It positively restored his faith in human nature.”

— Lauren Willig

5. “It was very hard to rant while accepting a cup of tea.”

— Lauren Willig

6. “Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.”

— Lauren Willig

7. “The green-painted shutters had been closed over the windows, giving the house the look of a comfortable matron who had knotted off over her knitting.”

— Lauren Willig

8. “I’m not sure intentions make much difference in the end. I hear the road to hell is paved with them. She meant it frivolously, but Olivia answered seriously, “Yes, but one does have to live with one’s self.” “Not necessarily... There are any number of ways to avoid living with one’s self. Gin, for example.” “Yes, but you’re still there at the base of it aren’t you. Only with a terrible head in the morning.”

— Lauren Willig

9. “It’s the exile’s dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.”

— Lauren Willig

10. “For the first time, Mary understood what drove animals to bite the hand that fed them – sheer irritation at being patronized.”

— Lauren Willig

11. “Even Sally wound’t want to cross fans with the Dowager Duchess of Dovedale. The woman had a tongue of steel and drank the blood of young virgins for breakfast.”

— Lauren Willig

12. “Amazing what the application of a knitting needle could do for one’s manners.”

— Lauren Willig

13. “Tell them I have the headache – no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.”

— Lauren Willig

14. “They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.”

— Lauren Willig

15. “But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.”

— Lauren Willig

16. “It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource. My sources had to be better.”

— Lauren Willig

17. “Love doesn’t attack; it infiltrates.”

— Lauren Willig

18. “If Amy had been around for the creation of the world, Jane had no doubt that she would have chivvied the Lord into creating the earth in two days rather than seven.”

— Lauren Willig

19. “I don’t believe anything’s really inevitable until it happens. We just call it inevitable to make ourselves feel better about it, to excuse ourselves for not having done anything.”

— Lauren Willig

20. “Her eyes were as hard and bright as stars. Not the pretty sort that poets mooned about, but the kind that made men’s destinies.”

— Lauren Willig

21. “The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.”

— Lauren Willig

22. “His mother made a noise that in anyone of lower rank than a countess would have been given the unmannerly name of snort. As a cowed member of the ton had once commented, ‘Nobody harrumphs quite like the Marchioness of Uppington.”

— Lauren Willig

23. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that one only comes up with clever, cutting remarks long after the other party is happily slumbering away.”

— Lauren Willig

24. “I love the sound of words, the feel of them, the flow of them. I love the challenge of finding just that perfect combination of words to describe a curl of the lip, a tilt of the chin, a change in the atmosphere. Done well, novel-writing can combine lyricism with practicality in a way that makes one think of grand tapestries, both functional and beautiful. Fifty years from now, I imagine I’ll still be questing after just that right combination of words.”

— Lauren Willig

25. “No sin is original, no matter what the bright young things may hope. We’re all merely playing to a theme.”

— Lauren Willig

26. “She could feel herself pressing the details into memory, saving them like dried flowers kept in a spinster’s chest, relics of a past that might have been, of a future that never was.”

— Lauren Willig

27. “Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don’t write ‘Private’ on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing around like some great sniffing thing.”

— Lauren Willig

28. “It hurt to kill a dream, like tearing petals off a rose in full bloom.”

— Lauren Willig

29. “Why was it that cheering expressions were invariably so infuriating?”

— Lauren Willig

30. “I should have known something was wrong when my advisor’s parting words were Good luck. To his credit, he had – very gently – suggested that I might want to consider a different sort of topic. But I didn’t want to consider another topic. I was madly in love with my topic: “Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France, 1789- 1815.” It had dash, it had swash, it had buckle.”

— Lauren Willig

31. “It wasn’t the big decisions that set the course of one’s life; it was the slow accretion of all the little ones.”

— Lauren Willig

32. “Patience,” she said in her best governess voice, “is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.”

— Lauren Willig

33. “There’s nothing so attractive as a blank slate. Take one attractive man, slap on a thick coat of daydream, and voila, the perfect man. With absolutely no resemblance to reality.”

— Lauren Willig

34. “Sometimes Richard had the sinking suspicion that he had a far better chance of preventing Bonaparte from conquering Europe than he had of thwarting his mother’s plans to see him married off within the next Season.”

— Lauren Willig

35. “Quite definitely a Bingley.”

— Lauren Willig

36. “I know historians aren’t supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie’s Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation’s organization look positively humdrum.”

— Lauren Willig

37. “This was Hist and Lit, after all. If you couldn’t work the term “liminal” into your tutorial, you were doing it wrong.”

— Lauren Willig

38. “If a man took a lover it would be accounted commonplace. Why shouldn’t you? Your virtue lies in your mind, not in what lies between your legs.”

— Lauren Willig

39. “Turning to Turnip, Miss Dempsey said, ‘Do you think?‘. ‘As little as I can,’ Turnip replied honestly.”

— Lauren Willig

40. “His look felt like a touch.”

— Lauren Willig

41. “A tempting little voice whispered that the means didn’t matter so long as the end was right. But she had never agreed with Machiavelli in that. The means shaped the end.”

— Lauren Willig

42. “A basket of wildflowers on Jane’s arm testified to a walk along the grounds, but she bore no sign of outdoor exertion. No creases dared to settle in the folds of her muslin dress; her pale brown hair remained obediently coiled at the base of her neck; and even the loops of the bow holding her bonnet were remarkably even. Aside from a bit of windburn on her pale cheeks, she might have been sitting in the parlour all afternoon.”

— Lauren Willig

43. “True friendship isn’t abstaining from hurting one another, but forgiving each other when you do.”

— Lauren Willig