When your partner worries about the declining health of his beloved parents whom you grudgingly help support:
“If you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them.”
When criticized for underpaying interns:
“Five hundred a year! I am sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it; and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think of it.”
When disapproving of your college roommate’s wedding registry:
“A great deal too handsome, in my opinion, for any place they can ever afford to live in.”
When telling your daughter not to break up with her bad boyfriend:
“A woman of seven-and-twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.”
When turning down a date with a man who admitted to once attending a Dave Matthews concert for his brother’s birthday:
“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own.”
When mocking your little cousin’s attempt at the haftarah portion:
“It would have broken my heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility.”
When your child finally screws up their courage to deliver a long and poignant speech about being gay:
“How very odd!”
When someone begs you in song and in person not to take their man, despite your flowing locks of auburn hair:
“These objections are nonsensical.”
When texting your boyfriend to say that you and your friend Charlotte have been describing the inadequacies of his penis all over town:
“I tell every body of it, and so does Charlotte.”
When claiming not to like Doctor Who:
“The Doctor is no beau of mine.”
When discarding your toddler’s present to you:
“It is not everyone who has your passion for dead leaves.”
When refusing to have sex with someone who hasn’t waxed:
“Because, among the rest of the objects before me, I see a very dirty lane.”
When refusing to go to your friend’s baby shower in Yonkers:
“I do not like ruined, tattered cottages.”
When talking smack about Sir John:
“Sir John is as stupid as the weather.”
Works Referenced:
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (Indiebound | Amazon)
Nicole is an Editor of The Toast.