Darcy's In Town

"We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You always have profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions." 

"Symmetric doubling is not intrinsically remarkable in Austen's fiction, of course. The titles Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility reflect the harmoniously epigrammatic rhythm of the eighteenth-century prose. But in that tradition, as in Austen's earlier novels, structural symmetry suggests the dependable order of a stable, rational world. In Persuasion, names and events recur in a disturbingly irrational way, reflecting a transient, uneasy one." 

"In [Captain Wentworth] the reader sees the educational process; in [Anne Elliot], only the product."

"'A strong mind, with sweetness of manner,' made the first and the last of the description. 'This is the woman I want,' said he. 'Something a little inferior I shall of course put up with, but it must not be much. If I am a fool, I shall be a fool indeed, for I have thought on the subject more than most men.'"

"The wedding was very much like other weddings, where parties have no taste for finery or parade... Mrs. Elton... thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.- 'Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!- Selina would stare when she heard of it.'-But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnesses the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union." 

"Immobilized by the large economic forces that created the unprecedented possibilities of upward mobility for men, the poor thus reflect woman's reality in the novel." 

"...Triling's stress on Austen's commitment to a charmed family circle assures us that Austen never upset the parlor on the dining room with overweening authorial preoccupations as unladylike as they are egotistical." 

"But the idea of any thing to be done in a moment, was increasing, not lessening Mr. Woodhouse's agitation. The ladies knew better how to allay it. Mr. Weston must be quiet, and every thing deliberately arranged." 

"Emma never thinks of herself, if she can do good to others," rejoined Mr. Woodhouse, understanding but in part.