Reasons to Embrace the Book: Two Jane Austens, Two Dennis Coopers, and a Thackeray

Sense and Sensibility:
"There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides, which mutually attracted them and they sympathised with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanour, and a general want of understanding."

Sense and Sensibility:
"Because they neither flattered herself nor her children, she could not believe them good-natured; and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was a censure in common use, and easily given."

God Jr.:
"When boys are allowed to pick their own costumes, they always want to be something that someone else has imagined."

God Jr.:
"Like every kid, I thought the world needed a face-lift, except the parts where Disney got there first."

[Thackeray is so wickedly sharp that he regularly makes me laugh out loud; however, the following is culled from one of his more sentimental strains and as such breaks with the tone established above.]

Vanity Fair:
"But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!"