Quotes from Persuasion

“If there is anything disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.” – Mary Musgrove

“A few months hence, and the room now so deserted, occupied by her silent, pensive self, might be filled again with all that was happy and gay, all that was glowing and bright in prosperous love, all that was most unlike Anne Elliot!”

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

Anne: 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.

William Elliot: You are mistaken, that is not good company, that is the best.

“[M]y sore-throats, you know, are always worse than anybody’s.” – Mary

“A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!—--He ought not----he does not.” – Captain Wentworth

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

“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.” – Mrs. Smith

“What wild imaginations one forms, where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!” – Anne

“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.” – Anne

“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

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. 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. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.” – Part of Captain Wentworth’s letter