Expect a most agreeable letter; for not being overburdened with subject (having nothing at all to say) I shall have no check to my Genius from beginning to end.
there is not one in a hundred of either sex, who is not taken in when they marry. ... it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.
A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals.
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.
Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.
The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others so bewildered and weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!
If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.
That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.
I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness ... Shyness is only the effect of a sense of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful, I should not be shy.