“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”

“I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all ...”

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

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.”

“She had received ideas which disposed her to be courteous and kind to all, and to pity every one, as being less happy than herself.”

“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”

“Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important ...”

“Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section.”

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; ...”

“Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human bei...”

“Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?""Alive," I say.”

“Life goes on, and deadlines arrive,even when it seems the world should stopout of respect for a shattered self-esteem.”

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

“All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.”

“Yet it is folly to argue against determined hardness; eloquence may strike the ear, and the language of sorrow draw forth the tear of compassion, but nothing can reach the heart that is steeled wit...”