"I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives."
— Jane Austen

"Shigure: JUST LISTEN TO ME FOR A SECOND, KYO!

Kyo: SHUT UP! I HATE THIS! DO YOU REALLY GET THAT MUCH ENJOYMENT FROM PLAYING WITH PEOPLES' LIVES?!

Shigure: Well, yes, now that you mention it, I do--BUT THIS IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD!

Kyo: Man, your persuasion skills SUCK!

Tohru: Um, welcome home. Dinner's-

Kyo: NOT HUNGRY!

Shigure: KYO! DON'T TAKE THIS OUT ON TOHRU! And come back to the entrance hall this instant and take those shoes off!

Yuki: He's right, Shigure. You really do suck at persuasion."
— Natsuki Takaya (Fruits Basket, Volume 1)

"You cannot reason people out of a position that they did not reason themselves into."
— Ben Goldacre (Bad Science)

"A hip-looking teen watches an elderly woman hobble across the street on a walker.
"Grammy's here!" he shouts.
He puts some MacAttack Mac&Cheese in the microwave and dons headphones and takes out a video game so he won't be bored during the forty seconds it takes his lunch to cook. A truck comes around the corner and hits Grammy, sending her flying over the roof into the backyard, where luckily she lands on a trampoline. Unluckily, she bounces back over the roof, into the front yard, landing on a rosebush."
— George Saunders (In Persuasion Nation)

"Anne smiled and said, "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." "You are mistaken," said he gently, "that is not good company, that is the best..." "
— Jane Austen (Persuasion)

"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 and a half years ago. Dare not say that a 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."
— Jane Austen persuasion

"One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering. "
— Jane Austen

"To yield readily--easily--to the persuasion of a friend is no merit.... To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding of either."
— Jane Austen

"We have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different. But he has been most pleasant."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. . . . Every moment rather brought fresh agitation. It was an overpowering happiness."
— Jane Austen persuasion

"There is hardly any personal defect which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to."
— Jane Austen persuasion

"Captain Harvile: Poor Phoebe, she would not have forgotten him so soon. It was not in her nature.

Anne Elliot: It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved.

Captain Harvile: Do you claim that for your sex?

Anne Elliot: We do not forget you as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world.

Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness.

Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men. "
— Jane Austen

"A man does not recover from such a passion, from such a woman, he ought not, he does not."
— Captain Wentworth