Persuasion

“A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”

“A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.”

“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”

“Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”

“Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.”

“For you alone, I think and plan.”

“Give him a book, and he will read all day long.”

“He could not forgive her, but he could not be unfeeling.”

“He had an affectionate heart. He must love somebody.”

“He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.”

“Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth, and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect.”

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn.”

“Her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way.”

“His cold politeness, his ceremonious grace, were worse than anything.”

“His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.“

“His profession was all that could ever make her friends wish that tenderness less; the dread of a future war all that could dim her sunshine. She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession which is, if possible, more distinguished in its domestic virtues than in its national importance.”

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.”

“I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”

“I do regard her as one who is too modest for the world in general to be aware of half her accomplishments, and too highly accomplished for modesty to be natural of any other woman.”

“I do think that men can forget a lost love quickly. I know that women would find it much harder.”

“I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me.”

“I hate to hear you talking so like a fine gentleman, and as if women were all fine ladies, instead of rational creatures. We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.”

“I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

“I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman.”

“I love your indignation.”

“I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.”

“I would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else.”

“If I loved a man, as she loves the Admiral, I would always be with him, nothing should ever separate us.“

“If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred and all duty violated.”

“If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.”

“Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.”

“Like other great men under reverses, I must endeavour to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

“Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.”

“One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.”

“One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.”

“She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.”

“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

“She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”

“She prized the frank, the open-hearted, the eager character beyond all others. Warmth and enthusiasm did captivate her still.”

“Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.”

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved.”

“There is hardly any personal defect…which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.”

“There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.”

“They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing!”

“Time will explain.”

“Too good, too excellent creature!”

“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”

“We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.”

“What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or of any person, I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it.”

“When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”