“Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person, whom you think the most agreeable in the world, the person who interests you at this present time, more than all the rest of the world put together.”

—  Jane Austen , book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

Last update Oct. 10, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person, whom you think the most agre…" by Jane Austen?
Jane Austen photo
Jane Austen 477
English novelist 1775–1817

Related quotes

“The average person is more interested in their own name than in all the other names in the world put together.”

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 73 (in 1998 edition)

Charles Bukowski photo

“It all comes down to the last person you think of at night, that's where the heart is.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Original: Tutto si riduce all'ultima persona a cui pensi la notte, è lì che si trova il cuore.
Source: In Una sorcia bianca – nella raccolta Storie di ordinaria follia

Elizabeth Strout photo
Elizabeth Gilbert photo
Anne Brontë photo

“Dear Halford,
When we were together last, you gave me a very particular and interesting account of the most remarkable occurrences of your early life…”

Prologue; Gilbert Markham, in the opening line of the novel
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

James Baldwin photo

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89 https://books.google.com/books?id=mEkEAAAAMBAJ; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (1 June 1964):
Context: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.

William Shakespeare photo
John Donne photo

“What if this present were the world's last night?”

No. 13, line 1
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Karen Joy Fowler photo

Related topics