The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

"Mr. Palmer didn't suffer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn't something she was proud of. It didn't spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality."
(p.50)

"It wasn't Jane Austen's fault that love went bad. You couldn't even say she didn't warn you. Her heroines made out well enough, but there were always other characters in the book who didn't finish happily---Brandon's Eliza in Sense and Sensibility; in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, Lydia Bennet; in Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram. These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren't."
(p.74)

"The great thing about books was the solidarity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been."
(p.82)

"Prudie found herself in sudden sympathy with Coach Blumberg. How wise was it, after all, to encourage these children to play at great love? To tell them that romance was worth dying for, that simple steadfastedness was stronger than any other force in the world? What Coach Blumberg believed--that there was something important about nine boys outpitching, ourhitting, and outrunning nine other boys--seemed, by contrast, a harmless fraud."
(p.107-8)

"Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children--happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way."
(p.178-9)

"My husbands weren't any of them bad men. I was the problem. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I like the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

"And then I couldnt' fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me. So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back."
(p.193)

"Had there always been this level of interest in genealogy, she wondered, even in the sixties, when everything was to be made from scratch? What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?"
(p.207-8)

"Sylvia was not a happy-ending sort of person herself. In books, yes, they were lovely. But in life everyone has the same ending, and the only question is who will get to it first...
"What if you had a happy ending and didn't notice? Sylvia made a mental note. Don't miss the happy ending."
(p.50)