Quotes from book

Persuasion

“I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”

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

“There is a quickness of perception in some, a nicety in the discernment of character, a natural penetration, in short, which no experience in others can equal…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I walk: I prefer walking.”

“It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other, or which had been the happiest: she, in receiving his declarations and proposals, or he in having them accepted.”

“I frequently observe that one pretty face would be followed by five and thirty frights.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort.”

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

“Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

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