Kindle has this wonderful, but slightly scary, feature called “popular highlights.” As you’re reading your book, you have the opportunity to add virtual bookmarks or notes and to highlight passages you especially like – things you may want to come back to for another read. Convenient, right? Right.

The slightly scary part? The folks at Kindle somehow know (because of the wireless connection, I’m sure) what you’ve highlighted in your books. Well, maybe not you specifically, but you collectively, the reading public. They keep track of which lines are highlighted and how many times. Anyone can see these “popular highlights” by selecting that item from the menu.

This feature is also pretty wonderful for me, though. It’s very cool, as an author, to be able to see which thoughts from my books stand out to those reading them, which lines were “profound” enough to be worth remembering. Not many people bother to highlight, so I can’t help but feel a little thrill discovering that something I’ve written was exceptional enough to warrant that bit of extra effort!

Most of the highlighted passages in my books seem to fall into one of two categories: love or wisdom. I thought I’d share the top romantic passages with you this time and save the “sage advice” for next time. So here goes. The first example is from For Myself Alone. The other three are from The Darcys of Pemberley.

 There is an intenseness of feeling in our embrace that is new to me – a unity of spirit, and a powerful longing for a deeper oneness in every other sense.

As their eyes met, a familiar, knowing look passed between them, causing her to take a sharp breath and feel a quickening of her heart. With private delight, she noted that nearly a year of marriage had, if anything, increased rather than diminished his power to affect her in this way. Elizabeth had no means of perceiving it, but at that moment Mr. Darcy entertained similarly pleasant thoughts about her.

“Here, with you, I shall always be, so far as it is withing my control. We must trust to God for the rest.”

Yet his conscience would not allow him to rest without giving his wife some token of his steadfast affection. Before extinguishing the candle, he turned to her and softly kissed the back of her head, lingering long enough to take in the sweet scent of her hair and whisper the words “I love you” as a blessing over her. A tear ran down Elizabeth’s cheek and soaked into her pillow.

What do you think? Do you have a favorite – one of these or an alternative? For some reason, readers of Return to Longbourn have been remarkably stingy with their highlighters. I know I wrote some romantic lines in that book too. Didn’t I? Somebody find and mark them, please! As for a favorite romantic line from Jane Austen, there are many to choose from. Hard to beat Captain Wentworth’s letter from Persuasion, however, which I enjoyed adapting for my upcoming release: The Persuasion of Miss Jane Austen.

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me 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 years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been but never inconstant.”

What’s your favorite romantic Jane Austen quote? Do you ever highlight in your Kindle? Why or why not?