Persuasion

by Jane Austen

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before;

it is singularity which often makes the worst part of our suffering,

it is only the lot of those who are not obliged to follow any, who can live in a regular way, in the country, choosing their own hours, following their own pursuits, and living on their own property, without the torment of trying for more; it is only their lot, I say, to hold the blessings of health and a good appearance to the utmost:

...

the art of knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle, was become necessary for her;

“Yes; you see his papa can, and why should not I?

Literalllly

He had thought her wretchedly altered, and in the first moment of appeal, had spoken as he felt. He had not forgiven Anne Elliot. She had used him ill, deserted and disappointed him; and worse, she had shewn a feebleness of character in doing so, which his own decided, confident temper could not endure. She had given him up to oblige others. It had been the effect of over-persuasion. It had been weakness and timidity.

If only women knew their worth the way Frederick Wentworth knows his

neither sickness nor sorrow seemed to have closed her heart or ruined her spirits.

Everybody’s heart is open, you know, when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health,

it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber: it is selfishness and impatience rather than generosity and fortitude, that one hears

For a few moments her imagination and her heart were bewitched. The idea of becoming what her mother had been;

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.

“but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering,

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.”