Top 50 Natalie Jenner Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “During the Great War, shell-shocked soldiers had been encouraged to read Jane Austen in particular – Kipling had coped with the loss of his soldier son by reading her books aloud to his family each night – Winston Churchill had recently used them to get through the Second World War.”

— Natalie Jenner

2. “The key, my dear, just so you know, is to decorate English, eat Italian, and dress French.”

— Natalie Jenner

3. “Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion. A most private activity, it was the perfect alibi for a young woman in a demanding household like theirs.”

— Natalie Jenner

4. “He loved Elizabeth Bennet instead – loved her in a way he had not thought possible with a fictional character. Loved the way she always spoke her mind but with such humanity and humour.”

— Natalie Jenner

5. “Understanding social mores through the lens of literature is just as important for young men as it is for young ladies.”

— Natalie Jenner

6. “Every person who made their village a site of pilgrimage was keeping alive the legacy and the aura of Austen, and as a lifelong fan himself, he appreciated that the villagers were involuntary caretakers of something much bigger than they could guess at.”

— Natalie Jenner

7. “Perhaps the chemical attraction from the start had been the key after all – perhaps that was what everyone out there was getting wrong. She remembered her mother telling her once that you need to be extremely attracted to the person you married because one day that would be all that was keeping you together, as well as the only viable way of making up.”

— Natalie Jenner

8. “Reading, she now understood, had been her own choice of rebellion.”

— Natalie Jenner

9. “Part of the comfort they derived from rereading was the satisfaction of knowing there would be closure – of feeling, each time, an inexplicable anxiety over whether the main characters would find love and happiness, while all the while knowing, on some different parallel interior track, that it was all going to work out in the end.”

— Natalie Jenner

10. “Grief and regret put a hole right through you that nothing can ever fill. And trust me, I’ve tried. And I suspect some of you have tried as well, with your own losses over the years. And the hard, crushing reality of it all is that the hole can never be filled. That you have to live with it, this absence that is not replaceable by money, or objects, or art – or even by another person, no matter how much you might learn to love and trust again.”

— Natalie Jenner

11. “But one can always read Austen.”

— Natalie Jenner

12. “Austen saw what lack of money meant for the women in her life, and this consuming fear was what was telegraphed most loudly in all her books, hidden behind the much more palatable workings of the marriage plot.”

— Natalie Jenner

13. “You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them. And, yes, God forbid, different people to love again.”

— Natalie Jenner

14. “By taking a few chances, Adam was starting to see that life never completely gave up on you, if you didn’t give up on it.”

— Natalie Jenner

15. “Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else. Terrified by his human vulnerability, Darcy proceeds to do everything to push Lizzie away except accuse her of some unspecified crime and having her carted off.”

— Natalie Jenner

16. “Darcy just couldn’t help himself, that much was clear to Adam – even if it wasn’t clear to Darcy. The character would spend over one hundred pages rationalizing all sorts of behaviour and reactions, grabbing on to straws, projecting onto Bingley the undesirability of marrying into the Bennet family, and rupturing his best friend’s budding romance with the heroine’s sister.”

— Natalie Jenner

17. “But you’re so right – she is vulnerable for once to a fake like Wickham because Darcy’s hurt her, and it’s getting in the way of her seeing things clearly.”

— Natalie Jenner

18. “The humanity – the love for people – mixed with seeing them for who they really are. Loving them enough to do that. Loving them in spite of that.”

— Natalie Jenner

19. “It had been nearly seven years, and for the longest time he thought he had been giving something to her by indulging his grief.”

— Natalie Jenner

20. “And, yes, sadly, no one else can ever understand your loss. It belongs to you. It impacts only you. And guess what? They don’t need to understand.” Mimi paused. “But you do. You need to fully appreciate how this has changed you, so that you can indeed move on and live, but as this changed person, who might now want different things. Who might now want different people about them.”

— Natalie Jenner

21. “They say that certain books can really help patients with trauma, and for some reason Jane Austen is one of the ones they recommend. I know she has helped me.”

— Natalie Jenner

22. “But part of it was the heroism of Austen herself, in writing through illness and despair, and facing her own early death. If she could do it, Dr. Gray and Adeline each thought, then certainly, in homage if nothing else, they could, too.”

— Natalie Jenner

23. “Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else.”

— Natalie Jenner

24. “That there might be a place where people were not constantly competing against each other for their very sustenance, but were instead helping each other survive through war and injury and poverty and pain, seemed as much something out of a Jane Austen novel as anything else she could have hoped to find.”

— Natalie Jenner

25. “Enough to work, live, and die on her own terms. It really was a most remarkable achievement, the legacy of those six books, revised and spurred on and cast solely by her own two hands, with no man with inevitably more power or money getting in the way.”

— Natalie Jenner

26. “But at times like this, he wondered if he was also the only one paying attention to the shortening of the days, the rubbish left by the side of the road, and the neglected and forgotten past.”

— Natalie Jenner

27. “It’s no magic prescription, but it’s a start. Reading is wonderful, but it does keep us in our heads. It’s why I can’t read certain authors when I am in low spirits.”

— Natalie Jenner

28. “Saved by Jane Austen.”

— Natalie Jenner

29. “December 22, 1945 The First Meeting of the Jane Austen Society In which the Jane Austen Memorial Trust is established, with the charitable objects of the advancement of education and in particular the study of English Literature, especially the works of Jane Austen.”

— Natalie Jenner

30. “He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to – whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him – a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably.”

— Natalie Jenner

31. “You read too much. You read her to much.”

— Natalie Jenner

32. “But her ability to forge on and heed that other voice in her head – the one that told her she was special, no matter what the outside world reflected back at her – was one of the things that she knew made her unique.”

— Natalie Jenner

33. “She had seen the thing right under everyone’s eyes, and she hadn’t let it go or been subsumed by the rigours of daily life. She had made space for discovery in the midst of a most contained life, the life that the world seemed bent on handing her.”

— Natalie Jenner

34. “I always find it interesting how Jane Austen’s fans are always romantics to some degree – when I swear she wrote those books with a goose quill dipped in venom.”

— Natalie Jenner

35. “Frances had retreated into these familiar worlds of literature. Something about her favourite books gave her tremendous comfort, and even a strange feeling of control, although she could not quite put her finger on why. She just knew that she did not want to invest her time trying to figure out a new world, whom to like and whom to trust in it, and how to bear the author’s choices for tragedy and closure – or lack thereof.”

— Natalie Jenner

36. “If they were caretakers out here of something bigger than themselves, then they each had a responsibility beyond their own self-interest that was incredibly difficult to deny.”

— Natalie Jenner

37. “But inside him, in the place that only books could touch, there remained both a deep unknowing and the deepest, most trenchant pain.”

— Natalie Jenner

38. “For the world that really existed demanded the pain, and the living with it, and would never let you go even when everything else fell away.”

— Natalie Jenner

39. “On some level, Mimi always enjoyed her infrequent meetings with Monte, as his love of hearing himself talk and his need to put others in their place kept him so fully occupied, she could usually just sit back and think about something else.”

— Natalie Jenner

40. “Because – and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this – inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world. He could disappear inside that world whenever he needed to – whenever he felt the outside world, and other people, pressing in on him – a pressure from social contact and expectations that was surely routine for everyone else, but affected him much more intensely and inexplicably.”

— Natalie Jenner

41. “You invite it in, and it never leaves.”

— Natalie Jenner

42. “None of us can ever say for sure what we’d do without feeling all of someone else’s slings and arrows along the way.”

— Natalie Jenner

43. “Mimi shook her head sadly at the young widow. “Adeline, my father killed himself when I was very young, and it impacts me even as we sit here. It is a part of me, that awful, irrevocable act. And I am never going to be quite whole again because of it. You are not the problem: the loss is.”

— Natalie Jenner

44. “What would you do?” “I honestly don’t know. That’s what’s so trying about all of this. It’s so completely, so thoroughly, unique to you. Like all of life. None of us can ever say for sure what we’d do without feeling all of someone else’s slings and arrows along the way.”

— Natalie Jenner

45. “Reading Jane Austen was making him identify with Darcy and the thunderclap power of physical attraction that flies in the face of one’s usual judgment.”

— Natalie Jenner

46. “Their two jobs were probably much more alike than either would want to admit. But where the reverend was being asked to change reality through prayer, Dr. Gray was being asked to prescribe hope in the face of reality.”

— Natalie Jenner

47. “All of these memories, big and small, were equal in only one – but one very significant – way. They all belonged to the past, they were invisible matter, they could leave no trace or mark on the present. Only life in the moment could do that – only this second in the hour – only this one fraction of time that was gone before you could even complete the thought. It was all both that ephemeral, and that infinitely reliable.”

— Natalie Jenner

48. “Because – and he still did not understand how people like his brothers could not see this – inside the pages of each and every book was a whole other world.”

— Natalie Jenner

49. “Knightley is another one who is so clueless – do none of these men know they are in love? Why are so many of her characters so lacking in self-awareness, do you think?”

— Natalie Jenner

50. “But he could also experience things from other people’s points of view and learn their lessons alongside them, and – most important to him – discover the key to living a happy life.”

— Natalie Jenner