Reading Persuasion

I’ve been reading Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” again and wanted to share some quotes that stood out to me so far. I forget how much of Austen’s writing is prose interspersed by dialogue. An interesting read when so much of our modern novels are filled with dialogue and very little prose. Persuasion has long been my favorite of Austen’s novels. There is something beautiful in a love story about second changes.

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“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.” -Page 19

“He had been most warmly attached to her, and had never seen a woman since whom he thought her equal; but, except from some natural sense of curiosity, he had no desire of meeting her again. Her power with him was gone for ever.” – Page 40

“–there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.” -Page 41

“It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impulse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded with pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.” -Page 58

“Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot Again.” -Page 68

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