- Lady Russell: Captain Wentworth
- Captain Wentworth: Lady Russell
- Lady Russell: You, have an extraordinary ability to discompose my friend, sir.
- Captain Wentworth: And you have an extraordinary ability to influence her, ma'am, for which I find it hard to forgive you.
- Captain Harvile: Poor Phoebe, she would not have forgotten him so soon. It was not in her nature.
- Anne Elliot: It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved.
- Captain Harvile: Do you claim that for your sex?
- Anne Elliot: We do not forget you as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world.
- Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness.
- Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men.
- Anne Elliot: If I may, so long as the woman you love lives, and lives for you, all the privilege I claim for my own sex, and it is not a very enviable one - you need not covet it, is that of loving longest when all hope is gone.
- Captain Wentworth: I come on business, Sir Walter.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Business?
- Captain Wentworth: Yes, my proposal of marriage to your daughter, Anne, has been accepted and I respectfully, sir, request permission to set a date.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Anne? You want to marry Anne? Whatever for?
- Anne: Oh, why is the whole town suffering from this dreadful misapprehension that I shall marry him!
- Captain Benwick: [Anne and Benwick are discussing poetry and he asks her which she prefers of two poems by Sir Walter Scott. Anne answers by quoting a line from the second poem. They then alternately recite the next few lines] Tell me, do you prefer "Marmion" or "The Lady of the Lake?"
- Anne: "Like the dew on the mountain / Like the foam on the river /"
- Captain Benwick: "Like the bubble on the fountain / Thou art gone /"
- Anne: "and forever!"
- Henrietta Musgrove: Louisa is grown so severe, Mama, I wonder she shall want a ribbon in her hair at all. Give her a book of verse to hold instead!
- Admiral Croft: What do you say, Sophie, is Frederick ready to fall in love?
- Mrs Croft: I think he's ready to make a very foolish match, George.
- Anne Elliot: Are you here for the concert?
- Captain Wentworth: No, I am here for a lecture on navigation. Am I in the wrong place?
- Elizabeth Elliot: When Captain Wentworth arrives you must not monopolise him. That's a very bad habit of yours.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Who is this - Admiral Croft?
- Mr. Shepherd: I met with him at the quarter sessions in Taunton. He's a native of Somersetshire who acquired a fortune in the war and wishes to return here.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Yes, but who is he?
- Anne Elliot: He is rear admiral of the white. He was in the Trafalgar action and has been in the East Indies since. He has been stationed there, I believe, several years.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Then, I take it, his face has both the color and texture of this macaroon.
- Anne Elliot: You presume to know me very well, Mr Elliot.
- Mr. Elliot: In my heart I know you intimately.
- Sir Walter Elliot: I was in company with a certain Admiral Baldwin, the most deplorable-looking person you can imagine. His face like mahogany, all lines and wrinkles, nine grey hairs and only a dab of powder on top.
- Mr. Shepherd: He is a married man, but without children. A house is never taken care of, Sir Walter, without a lady. And a lady with no children is the very best preserver of furniture in the world.
- Sir Walter Elliot: I strongly object to the Navy. It brings people of obscure birth into undue distinction and it cuts up a man's youth and vigor most horribly!
- Sir Walter Elliot: I will not have a sailor in my house. I strongly object to the Navy. It brings persons of obscure birth into undue distinction. And it cuts up a man's youth and vigour most horribly.
- Anne Elliot: Lady Russell, I have never said this...
- Lady Russell: Do not talk of it. You shall not talk of it.
- Anne Elliot: I do not blame you. Nor do I blame myself for having been guided by you. But, I am now persuaded that in spite of the disapproval at home and the anxiety attending his prospects that I - I should have been happier, had I...
- Lady Russell: You were nineteen, Anne. Nineteen - to involve yourself with a man who had nothing but himself to recommend him. The spirit of brilliance, to be sure, but no fortune, no connections. It was entirely prudent of you to reject him.
- Lady Russell: Here are the new poems I was telling you of. Altogether, I care little for these romantics, do you?
- Mary Musgrove: When you have a moment, you must go to Charles, Anne, and persuade him that I am very, very ill.
- Mrs. Musgrove: It is a very bad thing, to be visited by children whom one can only keep in tolerable order by more cake than is good for her.
- Mrs. Croft: I hate to hear you talking about all women as though they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. We, none of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.
- Mary Musgrove: Oh, this is always my luck! If anything disagreeable's going on, men are sure to get out of it.
- Louisa Musgrove: I will not be turned back from a thing I had determined to do by the airs and interference of such a person. I am not so easily persuaded.
- Louisa Musgrove: If only Anne had accepted him. We should have all have liked her a great deal better. My parents think it was Lady Russell's doing. My brother wasn't philosophical enough for her taste. She persuaded Anne to refuse him.
- Captain Wentworth: Do the women often come shooting Charles?
- Charles Musgrove: Not that often Frederick, no.
- Sir Walter Elliot: You may observe that one handsome face will be followed by thirty or five-and-thirty frights. Once, when I was standing in a shop in Bond Street, I counted eighty-seven women go by, one after the other, without there being a tolerable face among them. But then, it was a frosty morning, which scarcely one woman in a thousand can stand the test of. And as for the men, they are infinitely worse. The streets are full of scarecrows!
- Anne Elliot: You ought, perhaps, to include a larger allowance of prose in your daily study. Too much poetry may be - unsafe.
- James Benwick: You cannot know the depth of my despair. Phoebe would have married me before I went to sea, but I told her - I told her we should wait for money. Money!
- Anne Elliot: Come, now, Captain Benwick. Come, now. You will rally again. You *must*.
- James Benwick: You have no conception of what I have lost.
- Anne Elliot: Yes, I have.
- Anne Elliot: But I so dislike Bath.
- Lady Russell: Only because you associate it with the passing of your dear mother.
- Charles Musgrove: Look, kippers for breakfast!
- Mary Musgrove: Fetch me some toast and jam.
- Henrietta Musgrove: Toast?
- Mary Musgrove: Anne, why could you not have come sooner?
- Anne Elliot: My dear Mary, I really have had so much to do.
- Mary Musgrove: Do? What can you possibly have had to do?
- Anne Elliot: A great many things I assure you.
- Mary Musgrove: Well. Dear me.
- James Benwick: What's the news, Sir Walter?
- Sir Walter Elliot: A concert in the Assembly Room. To be given in Italian.
- James Benwick: [skeptical] Hmm.
- Sir Walter Elliot: A display of fireworks. But here is news indeed. Most vital news!
- Elizabeth Elliot: Father?
- Sir Walter Elliot: The Dowager Lady Dalrymple and the Honorable Miss Carteret are arrived in Laura place.
- Elizabeth Elliot: Our cousins.
- Sir Walter Elliot: Will they receive us?
- Elizabeth Elliot: They would not snub us, surely?
- Sir Walter Elliot: Please, God, let them not snub us!
- Sir Walter Elliot: Your looks are greatly improved, Anne. You're less thin in your person, and your cheeks and complexion is fresher. What are you using? Gowland's Lotion?
- Anne Elliot: No. Nothing.
- Sir Walter Elliot: I recommend the constant use of Gowland's during Spring months. Mrs Clay is using it and you see what it's done for her! Quite - carried away her freckles.
- Anne Elliot: My instinct tells me, he is charming and clever but I have seen no burst of feeling, warmth of fury or delight
- Mrs. Croft: We are here to improve the Admiral's health.
- Anne Elliot: What is the problem?
- Admiral Croft: Oh, dry land, my dear. Dry land! It appears it does not agree with me legs.
- Anne Elliot: He holds my father, he says, in high esteem.
- Lady Russell: That's perfectly natural that now he is older. Mr Elliot should begin to appreciate the value of blood connection.
- Lady Russell: This is all most agreeable. The heir presumptive reformed and on good terms with the head of his family. Most agreeable.
- William Elliot: Good company is always worth seeking. They may be nothing in themselves, but, they will collect good company around them.
- Anne Elliot: My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the fellowship of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation and a liberality of ideas. That's what I call good company.
- William Elliot: That is not good company. That is the best. Good company requires only birth, education and manners. And with regard to education, it is not very particular.