“Perhaps there's something to be learnt from novels after all" - Mr Collins, Charlotte ~ Pride & Prejudice Continues.”

“Mr. Darcy was in Pride and Prejudice and at first he was all snooty and huffy; then he fell in a lake and came out with his shirt all wet. And then we all loved him. In a swoony way.”

“But I do know that any place where there are six novels by the author of Pride and Prejudice must be a very special sort of heaven.”

“It taught me to hope," said he, "as I had scarcely ever allowed myself to hope before." Mr. Darcy - Pride and Prejudice”

“... [In 'Pride and Prejudice'] Mr Collins's repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia's elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen's point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence's ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth.Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation ... The dashes in Mr Darcy's letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. ... The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy's justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. ... The letter's totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event.”

“I wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion (to Pride and Prejudice) — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr. Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well.”