I meant to change my blogskin, but somehow it got too complicated to edit everything.

Anyway, I finally completed Persuasion, for the second time around. And although the perfection with which I once attributed to Anne's character has somewhat diminished with the second reading, it is still a very romantic book. I'm going to extract my favourite parts of the book. They're mostly from the ending.

"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." -Anne

"I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of every thing great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as - if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone." -Anne

And who could ever forget, the infamous letter which Wentworth writes to Anne: (Not the complete letter, I extracted the parts I liked.)

"I can listen no longer in silence. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell my 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. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant."

"I could never doubt that you would be loved and sought by others, but I knew to a certainty that you had refused one man at least, of better pretensions than myself: and I could not help often saying, Was this for me?" -Wentworth

"To me, she was in the place of a parent. I am not saying that she did not err in her advice. It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides; and for myself, I certainly never should, in circumstances of tolerable similarity, give such advice." -Anne