Charles Dickens (quotes)

Change begets change.
Friendship? Yes Please.
God bless us, every one!
Eccentricities of genius.
Least said, soonest mended
I only ask for information.
Lord, keep my memory green.
A good thing can’t be cruel.
The law is an ass, an idiot.
Trifles make the sum of life.
He would make a lovely corpse.
Please, sir, I want some more.
Discipline must be maintained.
Have a heart that never hardens
We must scrunch or be scrunched.
Oliver Twist has asked for more!
Reflect upon your present blessings
A new heart for a New Year, always!
To a young heart everything is fun.
Death is a mighty, universal truth.
I wear the chains I forged in life.
Grief never mended no broken bones.
We forge the chains we wear in life.
A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
Keep up appearances whatever you do.
The American woman is a monstrosity.
Why then we should drop into poetry.
Heaven suits the back to the burden.
We need never be ashamed of our tears.
A man must take the fat with the lean.
A multitude of people and yet solitude.
You are in every line I have ever read.
There wasn’t room to swing a cat there.
Walk and be Happy, Walk and be Healthy.
You have been the last dream of my soul.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.
Your voice and music are the same to me.
Novelties please less than they impress.
What greater gift than the love of a cat.
Once a gentleman, and always a gentleman.
A word in earnest is as good as a speech.
In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.
Then I’m sorry to say, I’ve eat your pie.
Veels vithin veels, a prison in a prison.
Let me feel now what sharp distress I may.
Never sign a valentine with your own name.
There might be some credit in being jolly.
He was bolder in the daylight-most men are.
Circumstances beyond my individual control.
Nothing of what is nobly done is ever lost.
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one.
A boy’s story is the best that is ever told.
All partings foreshadow the great final one.
Polly put the kettle on, we’ll all have tea.
You should keep dogs-fine animals-sagacious.
Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.
Philosophers are only men in armor after all.
A very little key will open a very heavy door.
Some people are nobody’s enemies but their own
And what about the cash, my existence’s jewel?
Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.
Scattered wits take a long time in picking up.
Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.
Poverty and oysters always seem to go together.
Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.
Them which is of other naturs thinks different.
Surprises, like misfortunes, seldom come alone.
Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.
I stole her heart away and put ice in its place.
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.
‘Tis love that makes the world go round, my baby.
Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast.
A contented spirit is the sweetness of existence.
It is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back.
I must do something or I shall wear my heart away.
In love of home, the love of country has its rise.
There seems a magic in the very name of Christmas.
Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.
There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.
He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.
Take a little timecount five-and-twenty,Tattycoram.
Home is a word stronger than a magician ever spoke.
We never tire of the friendships we form with books.
But the mere truth won’t do. You must have a lawyer.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.
Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door.
Poetry makes life what lights and music do the stage.
We can refute assertions, but who can refute silence?
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.
Hours are golden links–God’s tokens reaching heaven.
Money and goods are certainly the best of references.
Ride on! Ride on over all obstacles and win the race.
Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
Champagne is simply one of the elegant extras of life.
I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart
You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay
God bless us every one! said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
Anything that makes a noise is satisfactory to a crowd.
A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.
Take the pencil and write under my name, ‘I forgive her.
I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.
There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.
This is a world of action, and not moping and droning in.
My guiding star always is, Get hold of portable property.
The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.
Man cannot really improve himself without improving others.
Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you.
Tongue; well that’s a wery good thing when it an’t a woman.
If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
He is quite a good fellow – nobody’s enemy but his own.
Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.
Remembrance, like a candle, burns brightest at Christmastime.
Detestation of the high is the involuntary homage of the low.
The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
Remember, to the last, that while there is life there is hope.
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.
Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own.
The bearings of this observation lays in the application of it.
You don’t carry in your countenance a letter of recommendation.
I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.
Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
If a pig could give his mind to anything, he would not be a pig.
One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.
Bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew.
The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.
Although I am an old man, night is generally my time for walking.
The first rule of business is: Do other men for they would do you
Now, what I want is, Facts. . . . Facts alone are wanted in life.
The worst of all listeners is the man who does nothing but listen.
A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!
He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.
… as lonesome as a kitten in a wash-house copper with the lid on.
There was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.
I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
You touch some of the reasons for my going, not for my staying away.
Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.
Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you’ve conquered human nature .
Do all the good you can and make as little fuss about it as possible.
There is something in sickness that breaks down the pride of manhood.
There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.
No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused
The last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.
Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities.
The one great principle of English law is to make business for itself.
Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a little patronage more so.
To have a cricket on the hearth is the luckiest thing in all the world!
A dangerous quality, if real; and a not less dangerous one, if feigned.
One should never be ashamed to cry. Tears are rain on the dust of earth.
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
…and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it
The men who learn endurance, are they who call the whole world, brother.
When you drink of the water, don’t forget the spring from which it flows.
Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.
Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.
There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connection with manner.
Nobody near me here, but rats, and they are fine stealthy secret fellows.
It is an old prerogative of kings to govern everything but their passions.
Christmas may not bring a single thing; still, it gives me a song to sing.
I have been, as the phrase is, liberally educated, and am fit for nothing.
There are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk.
Meow says the cat ,quack says the duck , Bow wow wow says the dog ! Grrrr!
There is no substitute for thoroughgoing, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.
Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man’s pockets.
True love believes everything, and bears everything, and trusts everything.
And it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.
Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day.
The more man knows of man, the better for the common brotherhood among men.
I was a blacksmith’s boy but yesterday; I am – what shall I say I am today?
If I could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.
Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?
The universe, he observed, makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.
If the law supposes that,’ said Mr Bumble…’ the law is an ass – an idiot.
Perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.
They don’t mind it: its a reg’lar holiday to them – all porter and skittles.
In the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article
Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” returned madame; “but don’t tell me.
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it to anyone else.
There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.
A man ain’t got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.
Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
The habit of paying compliments kept a man’s tongue oiled without any expense.
There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.
Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.
There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.
Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.
Think! I’ve got enough to do, and little enough to get for it, without thinking.
if the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right.
I am light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.
It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.
People like us don’t go out at night cause people like them see us for what we are
Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
Your sex have such a surprising animosity against one another, when you do differ.
Old Marley was dead as a doornail… The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.
-Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch? -Because I’ll never cry for you again.
There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.
Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.
Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.
But the words she spoke of Mrs Harris, lambs could not forgive … nor worms forget.
I could settle down into a state of equable low spirits, and resign myself to coffee.
Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.
“It wasn’t the wine,” murmured Mr. Snodgrass, in a broken voice. “It was the salmon.”
Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.
… The sun does not shine upon this fair earth to meet frowning eyes, depend upon it.
All of us have wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.
“Oh!” said my aunt, “I was not aware at first to whom I had the pleasure of objecting.”
Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.
The New Testament is the very best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world.
Try not to associate bodily defect with mental, my good friend, except for a solid reason
Rich folks may ride on camels, but it ain’t so easy for ’em to see out of a needle’s eye.
No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.
Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years it was a splendid laugh!
That glorious vision of doing good is so often the sanguine mirage of so many good minds.
We all draw a little and compose a little, and none of us have any idea of time or money.
I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.
United metropolitan improved hot muffin and crumpet baking and punctual delivery company.
She had gained a reputation for beauty, and (which is often another thing) was beautiful.
I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together.
Happiness is a gift and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes.
Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.
Mankind was my business… charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.
Break their hearts my pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy. -Miss Havisham
She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.
[I]t seemed as if the streets were absorbed by the sky, and the night were all in the air.
Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.
… what such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance.
If they would rather die, . . . they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
“It’s nothing,” returned Mrs Chick. “It’s merely change of weather. We must expect change.”
Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers, and are famous preservers of good looks.
Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all my soul, that we shall see triumph.
A man can well afford to be as bold as brass, my good fellow, when he gets gold in exchange!
Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.
Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?
I went away, dear Agnes, loving you. I stayed away, loving you. I returned home, loving you!
Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.
Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?
My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; – the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It’s so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.
Time has been lost and opportunity thrown away, but I am yet a young man, and may retrieve it.
There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.
things cannot be expected to turn up of themselves. We must in a measure assist to turn them up
Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have got a little, it is often easy to get more.
Some women’s faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history.
What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!
“Do not repine, my friends,” said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. “Do not weep for me. It is chronic.”
The world belongs to those who set out to conquer it armed with self confidence and good humour.
Time and tide will wait for no man, saith the adage. But all men have to wait for time and tide.
But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof.
The beating of my heart was so violent and wild that I felt as if my life were breaking from me.
The sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on.
I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.
I am what you designed me to be.I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt
I never see any difference in boys. I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys and beef-faced boys.
Stranger, pause and ask thyself the question, Canst thou do likewise? If not, with a blush retire.
I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything
New thoughts and hopes were whirling through my mind, and all the colours of my life were changing.
Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you.
A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.
The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.
I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.
I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
I think it impossible, utterly impossible, for any Englishman to live here [in America], and be happy.
The ocean asks for nothing but those who stand by her shores gradually attune themselves to her rhythm.
Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.
It is because I think so much of warm and sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded.
And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment.
I have always thought of Christmas time… as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time.
Troubles are exceedingly gregarious in their nature, and flying in flocks are apt to perch capriciously.
It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and softens down the temper; so cry away.
Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it’s blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.
An inebriated elderly gentleman in the last depths of shabbiness… played the calm and virtuous old men.
She wasn’t a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads.
We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven’s pleasure.
I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.
“Madam,” replied Mr. Micawber, “it is my intention to register such a vow on the virgin page of the future.”
They are so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a water-closet doormat.
Family not only need to consist of merely those whom we share blood, but also for those whom we’d give blood.
The shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.
I feel an earnest and humble desire, and shall do till I die, to increase the stock of harmless cheerfulness.
Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.
Home is like the ship at sea, Sailing on eternally; Oft the anchor forth we cast, But can never make it fast.
Why, Mrs. Piper has a good deal to say, chiefly in parentheses and without punctuation, but not much to tell.
The New Year, like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and rejoicings.
He knew enough of the world to know that there is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart.
To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty’s holiest touch of nature.
Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in its painted history of suffering.
My dear if you could give me a cup of tea to clear my muddle of a head I should better understand your affairs.
A man in public life expects to be sneered at — it is the fault of his elevated situation, and not of himself.
So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!
Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.
And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at istelf and dies with the doer of it! but Good, never.
It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one’s hand.
Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.
It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.
For not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love.
I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
Constancy in love is a good thing; but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort.
“Drink with me, my dear,” said Mr. Weller. “Put your lips to this here tumbler, and then I can kiss you by deputy.”
I must be taken as I have been made. The success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.
Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.
Can you suppose there’s any harm in looking as cheerful and being as cheerful as our poor circumstances will permit?
Can I view thee panting, lying On thy stomach, without sighing; Can I unmoved see thee dying On a log Expiring frog!
The secret was such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it away.
Lawyers hold that there are two kinds of particularly bad witnesses–a reluctant witness, and a too-willing witness.
Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them.
Credit is a system whereby a person who can not pay gets another person who can not pay to guarantee that he can pay.
May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing for us to remember wrong that has been done us? That we may forgive it.
Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine.
My hair stands on end at the cost and charges of these boys. Why was I ever a father! Why was my father ever a father!
She better liked to see him free and happy, even than to have him near her, because she loved him better than herself.
Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure.
Friendless I can never be, for all mankind are my kindred, and I am on ill terms with no one member of my great family.
For though we are perpetually bragging of it as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper.
Don’t be afraid! We won’t make an author of you, while there’s an honest trade to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.
No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.
Of little worth as life is when we misuse it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it were not.
For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.
And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.
Possibly we might even improve the world a little, if we got up early in the morning, and took off our coats to the work.
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many – not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
‘Do you spell it with a ‘V’ or a ‘W’?’ inquired the judge. ‘That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord’.
I believe the spreading of Catholicism to be the most horrible means of political and social degradation left in the world.
She’s the sort of woman now,’ said Mould, . . . ‘one would almost feel disposed to bury for nothing: and do it neatly, too!
We know, Mr. Weller – we, who are men of the world – that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.
“Then what can you want to do now?” said the old lady,gaining courage. “I wants to make your flesh creep,” replied the boy.
… still his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.
A brisk, bright, blue-eyed fellow, a very neat figure and rather under the middle size, never out of the way and never in it.
That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity’s small change in general society.
In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease–a terrible passing inclination to die of it.
When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.
The streets looked small, of course. The streets that we have only seen as children always do I believe when we go back to them
My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.
Circumstances may accumulate so strongly even against an innocent man, that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.
[S]he stood for some moments gazing at the sisters, with affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.
Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!
It’s over, and can’t be helped, and that’s one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man’s head off.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.
Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead
Gold, for the instant, lost its luster in his eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could never purchase
a most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others.
I am well aware that I am the ‘umblest person going. . . . My mother is likewise a very ‘umble person. We live in a ‘umble abode.
Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.
A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within;.
By the by, who ever knew a man who never read or wrote neither who hadn’t got some small back parlour which he would call a study!
An evening wind uprose too, and the slighter branches cracked and rattled as they moved, in skeleton dances, to its moaning music.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
“I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night,” returned the haunted man.
In the Destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.
Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer’s expectation.
You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Stick to Facts, sir!
The wind’s in the east. . . . I am always conscious of an uncomfortable sensation now and then when the wind is blowing in the east.
There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
The cloud of caring for nothing, which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely pierced by the light within him.
For your popular rumour, unlike the rolling stone of the proverb, is one which gathers a deal of moss in its wanderings up and down.
Accidentally consumed five biscuits when I wasn’t paying attention. Those biscuits are wily fellows – they leap in like sugary ninjas
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.
If the parks be “the lungs of London” we wonder what Greenwich Fair is–a periodical breaking out, we suppose–a sort of spring rash.
What is peace? Is it war? No. Is it strife? No. Is it lovely, and gentle, and beautiful, and pleasant, and serene, and joyful? O yes!
The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and in short you are for ever floored.
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.
Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.
Marley was dead, to begin with … This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.
The wine-shops breed, in physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution.
I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.
Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.
Annual income is ¬£ 20, the cost is 19, you will feel happiness. If annual income of ¬£ 20, the cost is ¬£ 20.6, you will see suffering
… As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don’t get any pay, and he’s got nothing on his mind.
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.
In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is–as the light called human life is–at its coming and its going.
Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
Such is hope, heaven’s own gift to struggling mortals, pervading, like some subtle essence from the skies, all things both good and bad.
Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.
“O’ course I came to look arter you, my darlin’,” replied Mr. Weller; for once permitting his passion to get the better of his veracity.
“You see,” said Mr. Toots, “what I wanted in a wife was – in short, was sense. Money, Feeder, I had. Sense I – I had not, particularly.”
But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat.
There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.
May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?
When the moon shines very brilliantly, a solitude and stillness seem to proceed from her that influence even crowded places full of life.
When we have done our very, very best, papa, and that is not enough, then I think the right time must have come for asking help of others.
My imagination would never have served me as it has, but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention
I think it must somewhere be written that the virtues of mothers shall be visited on their children, as well as the sins of their fathers.
Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right.
Come in, — come in! and know me better, man! I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. Look upon me! You have never seen the like of me before!
When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the time with the tiger and the devil chained -not shown- yet always ready.
What are the odds so long as the fire of the soul is kindled at the taper of conviviality, and the wing of friendship never molts a feather?
The coffee was boiling over a charcoal fire, and large slices of bread and butter were piled one upon the other like deals in a lumber yard.
Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.
I verily believe that her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly – and that is the sharpest crying of all.
Around and around the house the leaves fall thick, but never fast, for they come circling down with a dead lightness that is sombre and slow.
Never,” said my aunt, “be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of you.
“I fear your kind and open communication, which has rendered me more painfully conscious of my own defects, has not improved me,” sighed Kate.
I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled.
“Why, what I may think after dinner,” returns Mr. Jobling, “is one thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another thing.”
and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.
I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty’s head will be dealt by this nation in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.
Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions.
The sergeant was describing a military life. It was all drinking, he said, except that there were frequent intervals of eating and love making.
Dickens writes that an event, “began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.
My dear young lady, crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered alone. The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.
“Well,” said my aunt, “this is his boy – his son. He would be as like his father as it’s possible to be, if he was not so like his mother, too.”
My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.
The privileges of the side-table included the small prerogatives of sitting next to the toast, and taking two cups of tea to other people’s one.
I’m awful dull, but I hope I’ve beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!
Old Time, that greatest and longest established spinner of all!… his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
Judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish him to bring it down one day.
We must meet reverses boldly, and not suffer them to frighten us, my dear. We must learn to act the play out. We must live misfortune down, Trot!
Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!
I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can’t beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.
It is well for a man to respect his own vocation whatever it is and to think himself bound to uphold it and to claim for it the respect it deserves
And I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States.
Never imitate the eccentricities of genius, but toil after it in its truer flights. They are not so easy to follow, but they lead to higher regions.
I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in consequence.
In particular, there was a butler in a blue coat and bright buttons, who gave quite a winey flavour to the table beer; he poured it out so superbly.
Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you have a head upon your shoulders, I’ll knock your bonnet off, and tread upon it!
There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.
I wear the chain I forged in life….I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.
He was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset
A heart well worth winning, and well won. A heart that, once won, goes through fire and water for the winner, and never changes, and is never daunted.
There can’t be a quarrel without two parties, and I won’t be one. I will be a friend to you in spite of you. So now you know what you’ve got to expect
… I have read in your face, as plain as if it was a book, that but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us.
Your Honour, unless your Honour, without a moment’s loss of time, makes sail for the nearest shore, this is a doomed ship, and her name is the Coffin!
Miss Mills replied, on general principles, that the Cottage of content was better than the Palace of cold splendour, and that where love was, all was.
You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn’t do it when your uncle George was living much less when he’s dead.
The word of a gentleman is as good as his bond ‚Äî sometimes better; as in the present case, where his bond might prove but a doubtful sort of security.
What lawsuits grow out of the graves of rich men, every day; sowing perjury, hatred, and lies among near kindred, where there should be nothing but love!
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves as one, but every child was conducting itself like forty.
On the motionless branches of some trees, autumn berries hung like clusters of coral beads, as in those fabled orchards where the fruits were jewels . . .
I find my breath gets short, but it seldom gets longer as a man gets older. I take it as it comes, and make the most of it. That’s the best way, ain’t it?
every idiot who goes about with a ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
“The twins no longer derive their sustenance from Nature’s founts – in short,” said Mr. Micawber, in one of his bursts of confidence, “they are weaned…”
The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.
The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.
He describes it as a large apartment, with a red brick floor and a capacious chimney; the ceiling garnished with hams, sides of bacon, and ropes of onions.
“There is no deception now, Mr. Weller. Tears,” said Job, with a look of momentary slyness, “tears are not the only proofs of distress, nor the best ones.”
Come, let’s be a comfortable couple and take care of each other! How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.
The aphorism “Whatever is, is right,” would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong.
In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.
The aim of talk should be like the aim of a flying arrow — to hit the mark; but to this end there must be a mark to hit, that is, there must be a listener.
He was consious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares, long, long, forgotten.
The most important thing in life is to stop saying ‘I wish’ and start saying ‘I will.’ Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as probabilities.
You are always training yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are, and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed.
“I know quite enough of myself,” said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, “and I don’t improve upon acquaintance…”
Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues – faith and hope.
There’s more of gravey than grave about you, whatever you are!” – Scrooge, referring to Marley’s ghost which he believes is a hallucination from food poisoning
I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
Battledore and shuttlecock’s a wery good game, vhen you an’t the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too exciting to be pleasant.
It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet.
Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.
Many merry Christmases, many happy New Years. Unbroken friendships, great accumulations of cheerful recollections and affections on earth, and heaven for us all.
The flowers that sleep by night, opened their gentle eyes and turned them to the day. The light, creation’s mind, was everywhere, and all things owned its power.
I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.
The day was made for laziness, and lying on one’s back in green places, and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one’s eyes and go to sleep.
Try to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than you should.
It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin’s system not to encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster.
Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?
Are you thankful for not being young?’ ‘Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don’t you see?
Quadruped lions are said to be savage, only when they are hungry; biped lions are rarely sulky longer than when their appetite for distinction remains unappeased.
Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.
I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people, who are not easy in their graves, keep the day they died upon.
‚ÄéAnd yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire.
I never had one hour’s happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.
It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities that she has, and not by the qualities she may not have.
And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable.
You should know,” said Estella. “I am what you have made me. Take all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the failure; in short, take me.
He was a very young boy; quite a little child. His hair still hung in curls about his face, and his eyes were very bright; but their light was of Heaven, not earth.
“Walter,” she said, looking full upon him with her affectionate eyes, “like you, I hope for better things. I will pray for them, and believe that they will arrive.”
The year end brings no greater pleasure then the opportunity to express to you season’s greetings and good wishes. May your holidays and new year be filled with joy.
It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.
It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
And can it be that in a world so full and busy the loss of one creature makes a void so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of eternity can fill it up!
We went our several ways,” said Lady Dedlock, “and had little in common even before we agreed to differ. It is to be regretted, I suppose, but it could not be helped.
it’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly.
Everything that Mr Smallweed’s grandfather ever put away in his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life he has never bred a single butterfly.
I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry–I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart–God knows what its name was–that tears started to my eyes.
The air came laden with the fragrance it caught upon its way, and the bees, upborne upon its scented breath, hummed forth their drowsy satisfaction as they floated by.
Being that rare sort of old girl that she receives Good to her arms without a hint that it might be Better and catches light from any little spot of darkness near her.
I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!
It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ’em, Pip, and live well and die happy.
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O ’tis love, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round!
There is something good in all weathers. If it doesn’t happen to be good for my work today, it’s good for some other man’s today… and will come around for me tomorrow.
You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,‚Äù said Miss Pross, in her breathing. ‚ÄúNevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.
Although a skillful flatterer is a most delightful companion if you have him all to yourself, his taste becomes very doubtful when he takes to complimenting other people.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.
The citizen … preserved the resolute bearing of one who was not to be frowned down or daunted, and who cared very little for any nobility but that of worth and manhood.
I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.
There is a Sunday conscience as well as a Sunday coat; and those who make religion a secondary concern put the coat and conscience carefully by to put on only once a week.
I took a good deal o’ pains with his eddication, sir; let him run in the streets when he was very young, and shift for hisself. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.
When we came within sight of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught at intervals above the rolling abyss, were like glimpses of another shore with towers and buildings.
You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!
“Peggotty!” repeated Miss Betsey, with some indignation. “Do you mean to say, child, that any human being has gone into a Christian church, and got herself named Peggotty?”
The forces that affect our lives, the influences that mold and shape us, are often like whispers in a different room, teasingly indistinct, apprehended only with difficulty.
We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.
“It’s an old habit of mine, Wal’r,” said the Captain, “any time these fifty year. When you see Ned Cuttle bite his nails, Wal’r, then you may know that Ned Cuttle’s aground.”
When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come to peace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest!
Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.
… Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.
‚Ä¶a lady of what is commonly called an uncertain temper –a phrase which being interpreted signifies a temper tolerably certain to make everybody more or less uncomfortable.
The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer’s shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in dusty corners of the window.
Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.
I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.
And therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that [Christmas] has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!
The more especially, as in my juvenile frankness, I took some credit to myself for being so confidential and felt that I was quite the patron of my two respectful entertainers.
Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but – I hope – into a better shape.
I should never have made my success in life if I had not bestowed upon the least thing I have ever undertaken the same attention and care that I have bestowed upon the greatest.
“You are a boy,” said Mr. Dombey, suddenly and almost fiercely; “and what you think of, or affect to think of, is of little consequence. You have done well, Sir. Don’t undo it.”
All the housemaid hopes is, happiness for ’em – but marriage is a lottery, and the more she thinks about it, the more she feels the independence and the safety of a single life.
We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.
I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the dissuadinig arguments of my best friends.
Boffin and me, ma’am, are plain people, and we don’t want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there’s always a straight way to everything.
Satisfy yourself beyond all doubt that you are qualified for the course to which you now aspire…..and try to achieve something in your own land before you venture on a strange one.
And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done– done, see you!– under that sky there, every day.
‘Mind and matter,’ said the lady in the wig, ‘glide swift into the vortex if immensity. Howls the sublime, and softly sleeps the calm Ideal, in the whispering chambers of Imagination.’
“Ecod, you may say what you like of my father, then, and so I give you leave,” said Jonas. “I think it’s liquid aggravation that circulates through his veins, and not regular blood…”
“Why, I don’t exactly know about perjury, my dear sir,” replied the little gentleman. “Harsh word, my dear sir, very harsh word indeed. It’s a legal fiction, my dear sir, nothing more.”
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.
It was very dark; but in the murky sky there were masses of cloud which shone with a lurid light, like monstrous heaps of copper that had been heated in a furnace, and were growing cold.
There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind Junior.
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.
“My comfort is,” said Susan, looking back at Mr. Dombey, “that I have told a piece of truth this day which ought to have been told long before and can’t be told too often or too plain…”
Over the whole, a young lady presided, whose gloomy haughtiness as she surveyed the street, announced a deep-seated grievance against society, and an implacable determination to be avenged.
The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far we are pursued by nothing else.
Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up…
The dreams of childhood – it’s airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.
Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.
But, in this separation I associate you only with the good and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you have done far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may.
I would like to be going all over the kingdom…and acting everywhere. There’s nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!
When I have heard him talking to Papa during the sittings for the picture, I have sat wondering whether it could be that he has no belief in anybody else, because he has no belief in himself.
I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable–indescribable–my misery amazing.
Opening her eyes again, and seeing her husband’s face across the table, she leaned forward to give it a pat on the cheek, and sat down to supper, declaring it to be the best face in the world.
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.
Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.
While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.
For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.
… when the locked door opens, and there comes in a young woman, deadly pale, and with long fair hair, who glides to the fire, and sits down in the chair we have left there, wringing her hands.
It is when our budding hopes are nipped beyond recovery by some rough wind, that we are the most disposed to picture to ourselves what flowers they might have borne, if they had flourished . . .
You have no idea what it is to have anybody wonderful fond of you, unless you have been got down and rolled upon by the lonely feelings that I have mentioned as having once got the better of me.
It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one’s self in going by.
and Mrs. Boffin sat staring at mid-air, and Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.
It was darkly rumoured that the butler, regarding him with favour such as that stern man had never shown before to mortal boy, had sometimes mingled porter with his table beer to make him strong.
Poetry’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked poetry ‘cept a beadle on boxin’ day, or Warren’s blackin’ or Rowland’s oil, or some o’ them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.
Keep out of Chancery. It’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.
If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never traced its name or any other inscription on her face.
But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn’t read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds.
There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last respect a rather common one.
Of all bad listeners, the worst and most terrible to encounter is the man who is so fond of listening that he wishes to hear, not only your conversation, but that of every other person in the room.
There are hopes, the bloom of whose beauty would be spoiled by the trammels of description; too lovely, too delicate, too sacred for words, they should only be known through the sympathy of hearts.
And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.
Its matter was not new to me, but was presented in a new aspect. It shook me in my habit – the habit of nine-tenths of the world – of believing that all was right about me, because I was used to it.
It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.
This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is noth-ing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes tocondemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!
Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.
Nothing is discovered without God’s intention and assistance, and I suppose every new knowledge of His works that is conceded to man to be distinctly a revelation by which men are to guide themselves.
You hear, Eugene?’ said Lightwood over his shoulder. ‘You are deeply interested in lime.’ ‘Without lime,’ returned that unmoved barrister at law, ‘my existence would be unilluminated by a ray of hope.
The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.
Oh Agnes, Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!
Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!
If Husain (as) had fought to quench his worldly desires‚Ä¶then I do not understand why his sister, wife, and children accompanied him. It stands to reason therefore, that he sacrificed purely for Islam.
He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been, in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away, by the fervour of this reproach.
Without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is mercy, and whose great attribute is benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.
This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.
I am at the moment deaf in the ears, hoarse in the throat, red in the nose, green in the gills, damp in the eyes, twitchy in the joints and fractious in temper from a most intolerable and oppressive cold.
I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music.
Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?
My father‚Äôs family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.
Their demeanor is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment.
There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea.
Yet, I had nothing else to tell; unless, indeed, I were to confess (which might be of less moment still), that no one can ever believe this Narrative, in the reading, more than I believed it in the writing.
Oh, a dainty plant is the ivy green, That creepeth o’er ruins old! Of right choice food are his meals, I ween, In his cell so lone and cold. Creeping where no life is seen, A rare old plant is the ivy green.
From the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has invariably gone one way Charles Darnay’s way the way of the love of a woman
Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it – as at last I did, thank Heaven! – and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to dawn.
It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.
I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt, and, of course, if it ceased to beat, I would cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no‚Äîsympathy‚Äîsentiment‚Äînonsense.
Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.
Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.
O, if the deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves!
It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
The expression of a man’s face is commonly a help to his thoughts, or glossary on his speech; but the countenance of Newman Noggs, in his ordinary moods, was a problem which no stretch of ingenuity could solve.
Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?” “I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? what reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.
I found Uriah reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.
Christmas is a time in which, of all times in the year, the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us, not less than our own experiences, for all good.
“Ah, Miss, hope is an excellent thing for such as has the spirits to bear it!” said Mrs Wickam, shaking her head. “My own spirits is not equal to it, but I don’t owe it any grudge. I envys them that is so blest!”
Have you ever had the sensation of looking at someone for the first time and ever so quickly the past and future seem to fuse ? Does that not mean something ? That we felt so much, so deeply, before even speaking?
And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
….that the mounds of ices, and the bowls of mint-julep and sherry cobbler they make in these latitudes, are refreshments never to be thought of afterwards, in summer, by those who would preserve contented minds.
Most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.
Cruncher… always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.
Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces ‚Äì and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper ‚Äì love her, love her, love her!
The great commander, who seemed by expression of his visage to be always on the look-out for something in the extremest distance, and to have no ocular knowledge of anything within ten miles, made no reply whatever.
When I speak of home, I speak of the place where in default of a better–those I love are gathered together; and if that place where a gypsy’s tent, or a barn, I should call it by the same good name notwithstanding.
We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.
Mr Lorry asks the witness questions: Ever been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord.
The two commonest mistakes in judgement … are, the confounding of shyness with arrogance – a very common mistake indeed – and the not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself.
I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can offer,” said Mrs. Maylie; “I know that the devotion and affection of her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and lasting.
With throbbing veins and burning skin, eyes wild and heavy, thoughts hurried and disordered, he felt as though the light were a reproach, and shrunk involuntarily from the day as if he were some foul and hideous thing.
Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well; whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely; in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.
“She’s a very charming and delightful creature,” quoth Mr. Robert Sawyer, in reply; “and has only one fault that I know of, Ben. It happens, unfortunately, that that single blemish is a want of taste. She don’t like me.”
“We thought that, perhaps,” said I, hesitating, “it is right to begin with the obligations of home, sir; and that, perhaps, while those are overlooked and neglected, no other duties can possibly be substituted for them.”
I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!
Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world.
I have sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming by and by into our lives. “Jerry, say that my answer was, ‘RECALLED TO LIFE.
For nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.
It was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject more psychological than gout, rum, and purser’s stores.
Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.
At last, however, he began to think — as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too . . .
I don’t like that sort of school… where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged… where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines.
The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current.
He was simply and staunchly true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small. So all true souls ever are. So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be. There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.
It is required of every man,” the ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.
He was by no means opposed to hard labour on principle, for he would work away at a cricket-match by the day together, – running, and catching, and batting, and bowling, and revelling in toil which would exhaust a galley-slave.
For the night-wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round a building of that sort, and moaning as it goes; and of trying, with its unseen hand, the windows and the doors; and seeking out some crevices by which to enter.
He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she had contentedly pursued her own lone quite path-for him. ~ Stephen speaking of Rachael
She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her ‘Ode to an Expiring Frog,’ sir.
There are chords in the human heart- strange, varying strings- which are only struck by accident; which will remain mute and senseless to appeals the most passionate and earnest, and respond at last to the slightest casual touch.
Old Mr. Rarx was not a pleasant man to look at, nor yet to talk to, or to be with, for no one could help seeing that he was a sordid and selfish character, and that he had warped further and further out of the straight with time.
I am in the theatrical profession myself, my wife is in the theatrical profession, my children are in the theatrical profession.I had a dog that lived and died in it from a puppy; and my chaise-pony goes on, in Timour the Tartar.
It being a remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavor to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.
This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?
There’s a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.
The rain and hail pattered against the glass; the chimneys quaked and rocked; the crazy casement rattled with the wind, as though an impatient hand inside were striving to burst it open. But no hand was there, and it opened no more.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before–more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
“Would you, do you, my dear?” rejoined the Captain … “I don’t know. It’s difficult navigation. She’s very hard to carry on with, my dear. You never can tell how she’ll head, you see. She’s full one minute, and round upon you next.”
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
… Waiter! raw beef-steak for the gentleman’s eye,-nothing like raw beef-steak for a bruise, sir; cold lamp-post very good, but lamp-post inconvenient-damned odd standing in the open street half-an-hour, with your eye against a lamp.
We came to the house, and it is an old house, full of great chimneys where wood is burnt on ancient dogs upon the hearth, and grim portraits (some of them with grim legends, too) lower distrustfully from the oaken panels of the walls.
Newman cast a despairing glance at his small store of fuel, but, not having the courage to say no-a word which in all his life he never had said at the right time, either to himself or anyone else-gave way to the proposed arrangement.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.
. . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . .
Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son’s having written a play.
Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?
I recollected one story there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year (it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own graves till morning.
My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind.
Let us leave our old friend in one of those moments of unmixed happiness which, if we seek them, there are ever some, to cheer our transitory existence here. There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
It was a cold hard easterly morning when he latched the garden gate and turned away. The light snowfall which had feathered his schoolroom windows on the Thursday, still lingered in the air, and was falling white, while the wind blew black.
I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.
“Then idiots talk,” said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, “of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.”
How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful in anger than in repose. I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting scorn; it will be enough for me.
Other sound than the owl’s voice there was none, save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.
You are too young to know how the world changes everyday,’ said Mrs Creakle, ‘and how the people in it pass away. But we all have to learn it, David; some of us when we are young, some of us when we are old, some of us at all times in our lives.
Hallo! A great deal of steam! the pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that. That was the pudding.
How many young men, in all previous times of unprecedented steadiness, had turned suddenly wild and wicked for the same reason, and, in an ecstasy of unrequited love, taken to wrench off door-knockers, and invert the boxes of rheumatic watchmen!
He had a cringing manner, but a very harsh voice; and his blandest smiles were so extremely forbidding, that to have had his company under the least repulsive circumstances, one would have wished him to be out of temper that he might only scowl.
There lives at least one being who can never change-one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness-who lives but in your eyes-who breathes but in your smiles-who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.
To be allowed to call her “Dora”, to write to her, to dote upon and worship her, to have reason to think that when she was with other people she was yet mindful of me, seemed to me the summit of human ambition – I am sure it was the summit of mine.
Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth . . . will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour.
There was a little plate of hothouse nectarines on the table, and there was another of grapes, and another of sponge-cakes, and there was a bottle of light wine … ‘This is my frugal breakfast … Give me my peach, my cup of coffee, and my claret.’
I could not help wondering in my own mind….how it came to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes – and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but I kept my reflections to myself.
We all have some experience of a feeling, that comes over us occasionally, of what we are saying and doing having been said and done before, in a remote time – of our having been surrounded, dim ages ago, by the same faces, objects, and circumstances.
It is a silent, shady place, with a paved courtyard so full of echoes, that sometimes I am tempted to believe that faint responses to the noises of old times linger there yet, and that these ghosts of sound haunt my footsteps as I pace it up and down.
She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch for any look he might direct towards her in reply; so the shaft of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound her.
In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another’s blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred’s downwards.
The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with red upon it that the sun had never give, and would never take away.
Heaven above was blue, and earth beneath was green; the river glistened like a path of diamonds in the sun; the birds poured forth their songs from the shady trees; the lark soared high above the waving corn; and the deep buzz of insects filled the air.
Mr Jarndyce, and prevented his going any farther, when he had remarked that there were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
Lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application, very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties of close shaving than for its always shaving the right person.
In every life, no matter how full or empty ones purse, there is tragedy. It is the one promise life always fulfills. Thus, happiness is a gift, and the trick is not to expect it, but to delight in it when it comes, and to add to other peoples store of it.

Wen you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy sand ven he go to the end of the alphabet, it’s a matter of taste.
I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.
His wardrobe was extensive-very extensive-not strictly classical perhaps, not quite new, nor did it contain any one garment made precisely after the fashion of any age or time, but everything was more or less spangled; and what can be prettier than spangles!
The sum of the whole is this: walk and b¬´ happy! walk and be healthy. The best of all ways to lengthen ourdays, is notas Mr. Thomas Moore has it, ” ]To steal a few hours from night, my love;” but with leave, be it spoken, to walk steadily and with a purpose.
There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the Christmas fire; and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.
The sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw, the streets were wet and sloppy. The smoke hung sluggishly above the chimney-tops as if it lacked the courage to rise, and the rain came slowly and doggedly down, as if it had not even the spirit to pour.
He had a certain air of being a handsome man-which he was not; and a certain air of being a well-bred man-which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge; but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world.
Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen’lman says of another, ‘the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so’ you vill understand, sir, that that means, ‘if he vill allow me to keep up that ‘ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.’
A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported what the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf. Her shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.
Your tale is of the longest,” observed Monks, moving restlessly in his chair. It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man,” returned Mr. Brownlow, “and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.
As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, – or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process – not to be traced by any human sense, – an awful likeness of himself!
For a long time, no village girl would dress her hair or bosom with the sweetest flower from that field of death: and after many a year had come and gone, the berries growing there, were still believed to leave too deep a stain upon the hand that plucked them.
“What is your best, your very best, ale a glass?” “Two pence halfpenny,” says the landlord, “is the price of the Genuine Stunning Ale.” “Then,” says I, producing the money, “just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head on it.”
A tranquil summer sunset shone upon him as he approached the end of his walk, and passed through the meadows by the river side. He had that sense of peace, and of being lightened of a weight of care, which country quiet awakens in the breasts of dwellers in towns.
There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain’t for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on ‘umbly, Master Copperfield!
Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
They are Man’s and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.
Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.
it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.
The man who now confronted Gashford, was a squat, thickset personage, with a low, retreating forehead, a coarse shock head of hair, and eyes so small and near together, that his broken nose alone seemed to prevent their meeting and fusing into one of the usual size.
You fear the world too much,’ she answered gently. ‘All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off, one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?
I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him; in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.
Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness.
But, for all that, they had a very pleasant walk. The trees were bare of leaves, and the river was bare of water-lilies; but the sky was not bare of its beautiful blue, and the water reflected it, and a delicious wind ran with the stream, touching the surface crisply.
A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
We owed so much to Herbert’s ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
As he glided stealthily along, creeping beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal.
Both Miss Lavinia and Miss Clarissa had a superstition, however, that he would have declared his passion, if he had not been cut short in his youth (at about sixty) by over-drinking his constitution, and over-doing an attempt to set it right again by swilling Bath water.
At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.
An observer of men who finds himself steadily repelled by some apparently trifling thing in a stranger is right to give it great weight. It may be the clue to the whole mystery. A hair or two will show where a lion is hidden. A very little key will open a very heavy door.
Although a man may lose a sense of his own importance when he is a mere unit among a busy throng, all utterly regardless of him, it by no means follows that he can dispossess himself, with equal facility, of a very strong sense of the importance and magnitude of his cares.
Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass–an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.
If ever household affections and loves are graceful things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and the proud to home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor man to his humble hearth are of the true metal and bear the stamp of heaven.
… Arthur Gride, whose bleared eyes gloated only over the outward beauties, and were blind to the spirit which reigned within, evinced – a fantastic kind of warmth certainly, but not exactly that kind of warmth of feeling which the contemplation of virtue usually inspires.
Rattle me out of bed early, set me going, give me as short a time as you like to bolt my meals in, and keep me at it. Keep me always at it, and I’ll keep you always at it, you keep somebody else always at it. There you are with the Whole Duty of Man in a commercial country.
It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.
He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity.
The dew seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves the air to rustle among them with a sweeter music and the sky itself to look more blue and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither.
It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.
And yet I love him. I love him so much and so dearly, that when I sometimes think my life may be but a weary one, I am proud of it and glad of it. I am proud and glad to suffer something for him, even though it is of no service to him, and he will never know of it or care for it.
“Ghost of the Future,” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?”
But I am sure that I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round…as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely.
Night, like a giant, fills the church, from pavement to roof, and holds dominion through the silent hours. Pale dawn again comes peeping through the windows: and, giving place to day, sees night withdraw into the vaults, and follows it, and drives it out, and hides among the dead.
Fledgeby deserved Mr. Alfred Lammle’s eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two.
I’ll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what real love it. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter – as I did!
Equity sends questions to Law. Law sends questions back to equity; Law finds it can’t do this, equity finds it can’t do that; neither can do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing & that counsel appearing for B.
The sun,–the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man–burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.
Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter’s day, how beautiful the shadows are! Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so. The loveliest things in life… are but shadows; and they come and go, and change and fade away, as rapidly as these.
It was the beginning of a day in June; the deep blue sky unsullied by a cloud, and teeming with brilliant light. The streets were, as yet, nearly free from passengers, the houses and shops were closed, and the healthy air of morning fell like breath from angels, on the sleeping town.
The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
All is going on as it was wont. The waves are hoarse with repetition of their mystery; the dust lies piled upon the shore; the sea-birds soar and hover; the winds and clouds go forth upon their trackless flight; the white arms beckon, in the moonlight, to the invisible country far away.
And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love – of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!
All I would say is, that I can go abroad without your family coming forward to favour me, – in short, with a parting Shove of their cold shoulders; and that, upon the whole, I would rather leave England with such impetus as I possess, than derive any acceleration of it from that quarter.
No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die.
Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families; and in families not regulated by that pervading influence which sanctifies while it enhances… in short, by the influence of Woman, in the lofty character of Wife, they may be expected with confidence, and must be borne with philosophy.
If I dropped a tear upon your hand, may it wither it up! If I spoke a gentle word in your hearing, may it deafen you! If I touched you with my lips, may the touch be poison to you! A curse upon this roof that gave me shelter! Sorrow and shame upon your head! Ruin upon all belonging to you!
Her heart-is given him, with all its love and truth. She would joyfully die with him, or, better than that, die for him. She knows he has failings, but she thinks they have grown up through his being like one cast away, for the want of something to trust in, and care for, and think well of.
Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress.
He was sailing over a boundless expanse of sea, with a blood-red sky above, and the angry waters, lashed into fury beneath, boiling and eddying up, on every side. There was another vessel before them, toiling and labouring in the howling storm: her canvas fluttering in ribbons from the mast.
Why should I disguise what you know so well, but what the crowd never dream of? We companies are all birds of prey; mere birds of prey. The only question is, whether in serving our own turn, we can serve yours too; whether in double-lining our own nest, we can put a single living into yours.
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine – which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity – it is the key to many reservations.
A silent look of affection and regard when all other eyes are turned coldly away-the consciousness that we possess the sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us-is a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth could purchase, or power bestow.
The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters.
The heavy rain beat down the tender branches of vine and jessamine, and trampled on them in its fury; and when the lightning gleamed, it showed the tearful leaves shivering and cowering together at the window, and tapping at it urgently, as if beseeching to be sheltered from the dismal night.
Long may it remain in this mixed world a question not easy of decision, which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty’s goodness, the soft white hand formed for the ministrations of sympathy and tenderness, or the rough hard hand which the heart softens, teaches, and guides in a moment.
The clouds were drifting over the moon at their giddiest speed, at one time wholly obscuring her, at another, suffering her to burst forth in full splendor and shed her light on all the objects around; anon, driving over her again, with increased velocity, and shrouding everything in darkness.
… when he saw her sitting there all alone, so young, and good, and beautiful, and kind to him; and heard her thrilling voice, so natural and sweet, and such a golden link between him and all his life’s love and happiness, rising out of the silence; he turned his face away, and hid his tears.
Nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.
In fine weather the old gentelman is almost constantly in the garden; and when it is too wet to go into it, he will look out the window at it, by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging, and sweeping, and cutting, and planting, with manifest delight.
The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached. Then, from behind a distant hill, the noble sun rose up, driving the mists in phantom shapes before it, and clearing the earth of their ghostly forms till darkness came again.
Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away.
The doctor seemed especially troubled by the fact of the robbery having been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact business at noon, and to make an appointment, by the twopenny post, a day or two previous.
One disagreeable result of whispering is that it seems to evoke an atmosphere of silence, haunted by the ghosts of sound – strange cracks and tickings, the rustling of garments that have no substance in them, and the tread of dreadful feet that would leave no mark on the sea-sand or the winter snow.
The town was glad with morning light; places that had shown ugly and distrustful all night long, now wore a smile; and sparkling sunbeams dancing on chamber windows, and twinkling through blind and curtain before sleepers‚Äô eyes, shed light even into dreams, and chased away the shadows of the night.
All knives and forks were working away at a rate that was quite alarming; very few words were spoken; and everybody seemed to eat his utmost, in self defence, as if a famine were expected to set in before breakfast-time to-morrow morning, and it had become high time to assert the first law of nature.
Notwithstanding his very liberal laudation of himself, however, the Major was selfish. It may be doubted whether there ever was a more entirely selfish person at heart; or at stomach is perhaps a better expression, seeing that he was more decidedly endowed with that latter organ than with the former.
He was the meekest of his sex, the mildest of little men. He sidled in and out of a room, to take up the less space. He walked as softly as the Ghost in Hamlet, and more slowly. He carried his head on one side, partly in modest depreciation of himself, partly in modest propitiation of everybody else.
We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.
The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all things ran their course.
The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune’s changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide; and the boys and girls never come back again.
She forgot to be shy at the moment, in honestly warning him away from the sunken wreck he had a dream of raising; and looked at him with eyes which assuredly, in association with her patient face, her fragile figure, her spare dress, and the wind and rain, did not turn him from his purpose of helping her.
A modest ring at the bell at length allayed her fears, and Miss Benton, hurrying into her own room and shutting herself up, in order that she might preserve that appearance of being taken by surprise which is so essential to the polite reception of visitors, awaited their coming with a smiling countenance.
It is a long time,’ repeated his wife; ‘and when is it not a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.’ ‘It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,’ said Defarge. ‘How long,’ demanded madame, composedly, ‘does it take to make and store the lightning? Tell me?
And thus ever by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.
After tea, we discussed a variety of topics before the fire; and Mrs. Micawber was good enough to sing us (in a small, thin, flat voice, which I remembered to have considered, when I first knew her, the very table-beer of acoustics) the favourite ballads of “The Dashing White Sergeant”, and “Little Tafflin”.
It had grown darker as they talked, and the wind was sawing and the sawdust was whirling outside paler windows. The underlying churchyard was already settling into deep dim shade, and the shade was creeping up to the housetops among which they sat. “As if,” said Eugene, “as if the churchyard ghosts were rising.”
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over? Because, if it is to spite her, I should think – but you know best – that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think – but you know best – she was not worth gaining over.
It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.
Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.
The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home together and to rest in her bosom.
The haggard aspect of the little old man was wonderfully suited to the place; he might have groped among old churches and tombs and deserted houses and gathered all the spoils with his own hands. There was nothing in the whole collection but was in keeping with himself nothing that looked older or more worn than he.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!
When death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes.
Then idiots talk….of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce!….But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I’ll show you energy.
He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand.
I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.
‘There may be some, perhaps – I don’t know that there are – who abuse his kindness,’ said Mr. Wickfield. ‘Never be one of those, Trotwood, in anything. He is the least suspicious of mankind; and whether that’s a merit, or whether it’s a blemish, it deserves consideration in all dealings with the Doctor, great or small.
Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the life of solitude among a familiar crowd. The stranger in the land who looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it, is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces daily, that were once the countenances of friends
So, Mr. Chadband-of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin-retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade.
An unfinished coffin on black tressels, which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror.
Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows.
But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble‚Äôs soul; his heart was waterproof. Like washable beaver hats that improve with rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of his own power, pleased and exalted him.
I don’t suppose there’s a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There’s youth to the amount of eight hundredpound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I’d take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get ’em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among ’em as nothing should equal it!
Before I go,” he said, and paused — “I may kiss her?” It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a handsome old lady, that she heard him say, “A life you love.
At last, in the dead of the night, when the street was very still indeed, Little Dorrit laid the heavy head upon her bosom, and soothed her to sleep. And thus she sat at the gate, as it were alone; looking up at the stars, and seeing the clouds pass over them in their wild flight-which was the dance at Little Dorrit’s party.
The cold hoarfrost glistened on the tombstones, and sparkled like rows of gems, among the stone carvings of the old church. The snow lay hard and crisp upon the ground; and spread over the thickly-strewn mounds of earth, so white and smooth a cover, that it seemed as if corpses lay there, hidden only by their winding sheets.
It was a dagger in the haughty father’s heart, an arrow in his brain, to see how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure stranger, and he sitting by. Not that he cared to whom his daughter turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through him, as he thought of what his son might do.
It was a harder day’s journey than yesterday’s, for there were long and weary hills to climb; and in journeys, as in life, it is a great deal easier to go down hill than up. However, they kept on, with unabated perseverance, and the hill has not yet lifted its face to heaven that perseverance will not gain the summit of at last.
His gaze wandered from the windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was hidden from him. Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much as know our letters in the stars yet – or seem likely to do it, in this state of existence – and few languages can be read until their alphabets are mastered.
Time was with most of us, when Christmas Day, encircling all our limited world like a magic ring, left nothing out for us to miss or seek; bound together all our home enjoyments, affections, and hopes; grouped everything and everyone round the Christmas fire, and make the little picture shining in our bright young eyes, complete.
There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.
He wore a sprinkling of powder upon his head, as if to make himself look benevolent; but if that were his purpose, he would perhaps have done better to powder his countenance also, for there was something in its very wrinkles, and in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce itself in spite of him.
If I may so express it, I was steeped in Dora. I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit, has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to total disagreement as to all the premises.
There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name; who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.
The persons on whom I have bestowed my dearest love lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my heart, and sealed it up for ever on my best affections. Deep affliction has only made them stronger; it ought, I think, for it should refine our nature.
She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.
When she took her opposite place in the carriage corner, the brightness in her face was so charming to behold, that on her exclaiming, “What beautiful stars and what a glorious night!” the Secretary said “Yes,” but seemed to prefer to see the night and the stars in the light of her lovely little countenance, to looking out of window.
I am a neat hand at cookery, and I’ll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It’s a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.
You are hard at work madam ,” said the man near her. Yes,” Answered Madam Defarge ; ” I have a good deal to do.” What do you make, Madam ?” Many things.” For instance —” For instance,” returned Madam Defarge , composedly , Shrouds.” The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, feeling it mightily close and oppressive .
I’d lay down my life for her – Mas’r Davy – Oh! most content and cheerful! She’s more to me – gent’lmen – than – she’s all to me that ever I can want, and more than ever I – than ever I could say. I – I love her true. There ain’t a gent’lman in all the land – nor yet sailing upon all the sea – that can love his lady more than I love her.
… I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly fine in Mr. Wopsle’s elocution – not for old associations’ sake, I am afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very up-hill and down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.
They whirled past the dark trees, as feathers would be swept before a hurricane. Houses, gates, churches, hay-stacks, objects of every kind they shot by, with a velocity and noise like roaring waters suddenly let loose. Still the noise of pursuit grew louder, and still my uncle could hear the young lady wildly screaming, “Faster! Faster!”
But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless.
“Next,” said Mrs Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of abdication under protest from the culinary throne, “I would recommend examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanour.”
She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph. I don’t know what she was, anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink, no looking down, or looking back. I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.
The rich, sweet smell of the hayricks rose to his chamber window; the hundred perfumes of the little flower-garden beneath scented the air around; the deep-green meadows shone in the morning dew that glistened on every leaf as it trembled in the gentle air: and the birds sang as if every sparkling drop were a fountain of inspiration to them.
Never, never, before Heaven, have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.
You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love her.
Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.
“A child!” said Edith, looking at her. “When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman – artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men – before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight.”
But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’ faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. Business!’ cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
Heaped on the floor were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, bartrels of oysters, re-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
He lived in chambers that had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again.
So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.
Some medical beast had revived tar-water in those days as a fine medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard; having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new fence.
… I feel certain that his tale is true. Feeling that certainty, I befriend him. As long as that certainty shall last, I will befriend him. And if any consideration could shake me in this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, that no man’s good opinion – no, nor no woman’s – so gained, could compensate me for the loss of my own.
He was drunk upon the average once a day, and penitent upon an equally fair calculation once a month; and when he was penitent, he was invariably in the very last stage of maudlin intoxication. He was a ragged, roving, roaring kind of fellow, with a burly form, a sharp wit, and a ready head, and could turn his hand to anything when he chose to do it.
All through it, I have known myself to be quite undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire- a fire, however, inseparable in its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no service, idly burning away.
There is not a manufacturer or tradesman in existence, who would not employ a man who takes a reasonable degree of pride in the appearance of himself and those about him, in preference to a sullen, slovenly fellow, who works doggedly on, regardless of his own clothing and that of his wife and children, and seeming to take pleasure or pride in nothing.
There was no wind; there was no passing shadow on the deep shade of the night; there was no noise. The city lay behind him, lighted here and there, and starry worlds were hidden by the masonry of spire and roof that hardly made out any shapes against the sky. Dark and lonely distance lay around him everywhere, and the clocks were faintly striking two.
Surely there had been no figure leaning on the back of his chair; no face looking over it. It is certain that no gliding footstep touched the floor, as he lifted up his head, with a start, and spoke. And yet there was no mirror in the room on whose surface his own form could have cast its shadow for a moment; and, Something had passed darkly and gone!
If its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists, at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.
I don’t know what to do!” cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laoco√∂n of himself with his stockings. “I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to every-body! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!
Ch√¢teau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well-thousands of acres of land-a whole province of France-all France itself-lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star.
They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down in the Crypt. The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast patterns on the ground. The heavy pillars which support the roof engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of light.
Such is the influence which the condition of our own thoughts, exercises, even over the appearance of external objects. Men who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from their own jaundiced eyes and hearts. The real hues are delicate, and need a clearer vision.
Now I am in the garden at the back . . . a very preserve of butterflies as I remember it, with a high fence, and a gate . . . where the fruit clusters on the trees, riper and richer than fruit has ever been since, in any other garden, and where my mother gathers some in a basket while I stand by, bolting furtive gooseberries, and trying to look unnerved.
There is nothing–no, nothing–innocent or good, that dies and is forgotten; let us hold to that faith or none. An infant, a prattling child, dying in the cradle, will live again in the better thoughts of those that loved it, and play its part through them in the redeeming actions of the world, though its body be burnt to ashes or drowned in the deep sea.
And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
A moment, and its glory was no more. The sun went down beneath the long dark lines of hill and cloud which piled up in the west an airy city, wall heaped on wall, and battlement on battlement; the light was all withdrawn; the shining church turned cold and dark; the stream forgot to smile; the birds were silent; and the gloom of winter dwelt on everything.
My uncle, gentlemen, could say nothing; he was so very much astonished The queerest thing of all, was, that although there was such a crowd of persons, and although fresh faces were pouring in, every moment, there was no telling where they came from. They seemed to start up, in some strange manner, from the ground, or the air, and disappear in the same way.
How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart.
He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk ‚Äî that anything ‚Äî could give him so much happiness.
I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.
There either is or is not, that‚Äôs the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it‚Äôs red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I‚Äôm not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I‚Äôm going to tell it the way I remember it.
We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done- of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
If Natur has gifted a man with powers of argeyment, a man has a right to make the best of ’em, and has not a right to stand on false delicacy, and deny that he is so gifted; for that is a turning of his back on Natur, a flouting of her, a slighting of her precious caskets, and a proving of one’s self to be a swine that isn’t worth her scattering pearls before.
Lammle’s manner changed under the poor silly girl’s embraces, and she turned extremely pale: directing one appealing look, first to Mrs. Boffin, and then to Mr. Boffin. Both understood her instantly, with a more delicate subtlety than much better educated people, whose perception came less directly from the heart, could have brought to bear upon the case.
“And when you had made sure of the poor little fool,” said my aunt – “God forgive me that I should call her so, and she gone where YOU won’t go in a hurry – because you had not done wrong enough to her and hers, you must begin to train her, must you? begin to break her, like a poor caged bird, and wear her deluded life away, in teaching her to sing YOUR notes?”
“People can’t die, along the coast,” said Mr. Peggotty, “except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in – not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide. It’s ebb at half-arter three, slack water half an hour. If he lives till it turns, he’ll hold his own till past the flood, and go out with the next tide.”
Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land.
A tender young cork, however, would have had no more chance against a pair of corkscrews, or a tender young tooth against a pair of dentists, or a little shuttlecock against two battledores, than I had against Uriah and Mrs. Heep. They did just what they liked with me; and wormed things out of me that I had no desire to tell, with a certainty I blush to think of.
“I go so far as to say, miss, morehover,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit-“and let my words be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself-that wot my opinions respectin’ flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present time.”
When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.
It has always been my opinion since I first possessed such a thing as an opinion, that the man who knows only one subject is next tiresome to the man who knows no subject. Therefore, in the course of my life I have taught myself whatever I could, and although I am not an educated man, I am able, I am thankful to say, to have an intelligent interest in most things.
The bright, frosty day declined as they walked and spoke together. The sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old city lay red before them, as their walk drew to a close. The moaning water cast its seaweed duskily at their feet, when they turned to leave its margin; and the rooks hovered above them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the darkening air.
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast. Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them.
Recollections of the past and visions of the present come to bear me company; the meanest man to whom I have ever given alms appears, to add his mite of peace and comfort to my stock; and whenever the fire within me shall grow cold, to light my path upon this earth no more, I pray that it may be at such an hour as this, and when I love the world as well as I do now.
If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world’s end without fear. I can give up nothing for you – I have nothing to resign, and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have sense and memory left.
Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o‚Äôclock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
He says-him as was here just now-‘When Tom shut up the house, mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you’d see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with what?’ he says. ‘Why, with the rats under ’em.’
“I take my leave of you, Mr. Creakle, and all of you,” said Mr. Mell, glancing round the room, and again patting me gently on the shoulders. “James Steerforth, the best wish I can leave you is that you may come to be ashamed of what you have done today. At present I would prefer to see you anything rather than a friend, to me, or to anyone in whom I feel an interest.”
I don’t feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. . . I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.
I have been very fortunate in worldly matters; many men have worked much harder, and not succeeded half so well; but I never could have done what I have done, without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object at a time, no matter how quickly its successor should come upon its heels, which I then formed.
It can’t be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho’ I’m oncommon fond of reading, too.” Are you, Joe?” Oncommon. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, ‘Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,’ how interesting reading is!
It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.
A display of indifference to all the actions and passions of mankind was not supposed to be such a distinguished quality at that time, I think, as I have observed it to be considered since. I have known it very fashionable indeed. I have seen it displayed with such success, that I have encountered some fine ladies and gentlemen who might as well have been born caterpillars.
When men are about to commit, or sanction the commission of some injustice, it is not uncommon for them to express pity for the object either of that or some parallel proceeding, and to feel themselves, at the time, quite virtuous and moral, and immensely superior to those who express no pity at all. This is a kind of upholding of faith above works, and is very comfortable.
In this way they went on, and on, and on-in the language of the story-books-until at last the village lights appeared before them, and the church spire cast a long reflection on the graveyard grass; as if it were a dial (alas, the truest in the world!) marking, whatever light shone out of Heaven, the flight of days and weeks and years, by some new shadow on that solemn ground.
Under none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
On the eve of long voyages or an absence of many years, friends who are tenderly attached will seperate with the usual look, the usual pressure of the hand, planning one final interview for the morrow, while each well knows that it is but a poor feint to save the pain of uttering that one word, and the meeting will never be. Should possibilities be worse to bear than certainties?
I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other’s soul, than I was in the souls of both.
For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?
Its very pulse, if I may use the word, was like no other clock. It did not mark the flight of every moment with a gentle second stroke, as though it would check old Time, and have him stay his pace in pity, but measured it with one sledge-hammer beat, as if its business were to crush the seconds as they came trooping on, and remorselessly to clear a path before the Day of Judgment.
Out upon merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer…? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ upon his lips should be boiled with his won pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!
what I want you to be – I don’t mean physically but morally: you are very well physically – is a firm fellow, a fine firm fellow, with a will of your own, with resolution. with determination. with strength of character that is not to be influenced except on good reason by anybody, or by anything. That’s what I want you to be. That’s what your father, & your mother might both have been
“Vell,” said Mr. Weller, “Now I s’pose he’ll want to call some witnesses to speak to his character, or p’raps to prove a alleybi. I’ve been a turnin’ the bis’ness over in my mind, and he may make his-self easy, Sammy. I’ve got some friends as’ll do either for him, but my adwice ‘ud be this here-never mind the character, and stick to the alleybi. Nothing like a alleybi, Sammy, nothing.”
Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath; but that was not much. Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony; but that was not much. Flora, who had seemed enchanting in all she said and thought, was diffuse and silly. That was much. Flora, who had been spoiled and artless long ago, was determined to be spoiled and artless now. That was a fatal blow.
And when it has got in; as one not finding what it seeks, whatever that may be, it wails and howls to issue forth again: and not content with stalking through the aisles, and gliding round and round the pillars, and tempting the deep organ, soars up to the roof, and strives to rend the rafters: then flings itself despairingly upon the stones below, and passes, muttering, into the vaults.
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any.If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned – would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.
There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
I thought it very touching to see these two women, coarse and shabby and beaten, so united; to see what they could be to one another; to see how they felt for one another, how the heart of each to each was softened by the hard trials of their lives. I think the best side of such people is almost hidden from us. What the poor are to the poor is little known, excepting to themselves and God.
Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.
Morning drew on apace. The air became more sharp and piercing, as its first dull hue: the death of night, rather than the birth of day: glimmered faintly in the sky. The objects which had looked dim and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually resolved into their familiar shapes. The rain came down, thick and fast; and pattered, noisily, among the leafless bushes.
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
The nephew revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn’s.
That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisoner’s head was taken off.
So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.
We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.
Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment.
“Mine ain’t a selfish affection, you know,” said Mr. Toots, in the confidence engendered by his having been a witness of the Captain’s tenderness. “It’s the sort of thing with me, Captain Gills, that if I could be run over – or – or trampled upon – or – or thrown off a very high place -or anything of that sort – for Miss Dombey’s sake, it would be the most delightful thing that could happen to me.”
“I am not afeard, my Heart’s-delight,” resumed the Captain. “There’s been most uncommon bad weather in them latitudes, there’s no denyin’, and they have drove and drove and been beat off, may be t’other side the world. But the ship’s a good ship, and the lad’s a good lad; and it ain’t easy, thank the Lord,” the Captain made a little bow, “to break up hearts of oak, whether they’re in brigs or buzzums.”
To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things – but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.
A mob is usually a creature of very mysterious existence, particularly in a large city. Where it comes from, or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficult to follow to its various sources as the sea itself; nor does the parallel stop here, for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrible when roused, more unreasonable or more cruel.
Poor Mr. Pickwick! … If he played a wrong card, Miss Bolo looked a small armoury of daggers; if he stopped to consider which was the right one, Lady Snuphanuph would throw herself back in her chair, and smile with a mingled glance of impatience and pity to Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, at which Mrs. Colonel Wugsby would shrug up her shoulders, and cough, as much as to say she wondered whether he ever would begin.
“Hope, you see, Wal’r,” said the Captain, sagely, “Hope. It’s that as animates you. Hope is a buoy, for which you overhaul your Little Warbler, sentimental diwision, but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy, it only floats; it can’t be steered nowhere. Along with the figure-head of Hope,’ said the Captain, ‘there’s a anchor; but what’s the good of my having a anchor, if I can’t find no bottom to let it go in?”
“It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals,” said he, “to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel.”
You have been so careful of me that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so well that I never dreamed a child’s dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, Father ,from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s belief or a child’s fear. Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it. ” My dear Louisa,” said he, you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me, my dear girl.
A blight had fallen on the trees and shrubs; and the wind, at length beginning to break the unnatural stillness that had prevailed all day, sighed heavily from time to time, as though foretelling in grief the ravages of the coming storm. The bat skimmed in fantastic flights through the heavy air, and the ground was alive with crawling things, whose instinct brought them forth to swell and fatten in the rain.
I don’t remember forms or faces now, but I know the girl was beautiful. I know she was; for in the bright moonlight nights, when I start from my sleep, and all is quiet about me, I see, standing still and motionless in one corner of this cell, a slight and wasted figure with long black hair, which streaming down her back, stirs with no earthly wind, and eyes that fix their gaze on me, and never wink or close.
It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; – although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.
Upon the purple tree-tops far away, and on the green height near at hand up which the shades were slowly creeping, there was an equal hush. Between the real landscape and its shadow in the water, there was no division; both were so untroubled and clear, and, while so fraught with solemn mystery of life and death, so hopefully reassuring to the gazer’s soothed heart, because so tenderly and mercifully beautiful.
The earth covered with a sable pall as for the burial of yesterday; the clumps of dark trees, its giant plumes of funeral feathers, waving sadly to and fro: all hushed, all noiseless, and in deep repose, save the swift clouds that skim across the moon, and the cautious wind, as, creeping after them upon the ground, it stops to listen, and goes rustling on, and stops again, and follows, like a savage on the trail.
I don’t quite recollect how many tumblers of whiskey toddy each man drank after supper; but this I know, that about one o’clock in the morning, the baillie’s grown-up son became insensible while attempting the first verse of ‘Willie brewed a peck o’ maut’; and he having been, for half an hour before, the only other man visible above the mahogany, it occurred to my uncle that it was almost time to think about going.
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.
Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections. Mr. Dombey’s young child was, from the beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced, like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a very low foundation.
The wide stare stared itself out for one while; the Sun went down in a red, green, golden glory; the stars came out in the heavens, and the fire-flies mimicked them in the lower air, as men may feebly imitate the goodness of a better order of beings; the long dusty roads and the interminable plains were in repose-and so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead.
Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain.
… the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.
There once was a child, and he strolled about a good deal, and thought of a number of things. He had a sister, who was a child too, and his constant companion. These two used to wonder all day long. They wondered at the beauty of the flowers; they wondered at the height and blueness of the sky; they wondered at the depth of the bright water; they wondered at the goodness and the power of God who made the lovely world.
The receptive attitude enables one mind to fix itself to another as by spiritual grappling-irons. When you see that every word you utter us taken in, and weighed, and measured by your listener, you cannot free yourself from the influence of his presence. You are compelled to have in your thoughts not only the words you utter, but the man to whom they are spoken. You must not only talk, and talk well, but you must talk to him.
There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress and little adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed.
The evening wind made such a disturbance just now, among some tall old elm-trees at the bottom of the garden, that neither my mother nor Miss Betsey could forbear glancing that way. As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind.
What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!
“But even if he has been wicked,” pursued Rose, “think how young he is; think that he may never have known a mother’s love, or the comfort of a home; that ill-usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt. Aunt, dear aunt, for mercy’s sake, think of this, before you let them drag this sick child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his chances of amendment.”
Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry.
Father Time is not always a hard parent and though he tarries for none of his children, often lays his hand lightly upon those who have used him well; making them old men and women inexorably enough, but leaving their hearts and spirits young and in full vigor. With such people the gray head is but the impression of the old fellow’s hand in giving them his blessing, and every wrinkle but a notch in the quiet calendar of a well-spent life.
It was a murky confusion ‚Äî here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel ‚Äî of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.
I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men’s sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.
The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble.
The Secretary, working in the Dismal Swamp betimes next morning, was informed that a youth waited in the hall who gave the name of Sloppy. The footman who communicated this intelligence made a decent pause before uttering the name, to express that it was forced on his reluctance by the youth in question, and that if the youth had had the good sense and good taste to inherit some other name it would have spared the feelings of him the bearer.
Be guided, only by the healer of the sick, the raiser of the dead, the friend of all who were afflicted and forlorn, the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities. We cannot but be right if we put all the rest away, and do everything in remembrance of Him. There is no vengeance and no infliction of suffering in His life, I am sure. There can be no confusion in following Him, and seeking for no other footsteps, I am certain!
The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember – as a sort of introductory overture – by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet.
As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don’t blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again.
The sum of the whole is this: walk and be happy, walk and be healthy. “The best of all ways to lengthen our days” is not, as Mr. Thomas Moore has it, “to steal a few hours from night, my love;” but, with leave be it spoken, to walk steadily and with a purpose. The wandering man knows of certain ancients, far gone in years, who have staved off infirmities and dissolution by earnest walking,-hale fellows close upon eighty and ninety, but brisk as boys.
Boffin, insisting that Bella should make tomorrow’s expedition in the chariot, she went home in great grandeur. Mrs. Wilfer and Miss Lavinia had speculated much on the probabilities and improbabilities of her coming in this gorgeous state, and, on beholding the chariot from the window at which they were secreted to look out for it, agreed that it must be detained at the door as long as possible, for the mortification and confusion of the neighbours.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s bright torch as fast as it is kindled!
The clouds were flying fast, the wind was coming up in gusts, banging some neighboring shutters that had broken loose, twirling the rusty chimney-cowls and weathercocks, and rushing round and round a confined adjacent churchyard as if it had a mind to blow the dead citizens out of their graves. The low thunder, muttering in all quarters of the sky at once, seemed to threaten vengeance for this attempted desecration, and to mutter, “Let them rest! Let them rest!
There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands. Withered leaves crackled and snapped beneath his feet, as he crept softly on towards the house. The desolation of a winter night sat brooding on the earth, and in the sky. But, the red light came cheerily towards him from the windows; figures passed and repassed there; and the hum and murmur of voices greeted his ear sweetly.
To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too – it really was – to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite.
Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.
Change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. If a man habituated to a narrow circle of cares and pleasures, out of which he seldom travels, step beyond it, though for never so brief a space, his departure from the monotonous scene on which he has been an actor of importance would seem to be the signal for instant confusion. The mine which Time has slowly dug beneath familiar objects is sprung in an instant; and what was rock before, becomes but sand and dust.
The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush–sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes…. It is they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while their ‘betters’ were derelict.
I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.
Dombey and Son had often dealt in hides, but never in hearts. They left that fancy ware to boys and girls, and boarding-schools and books. Mr. Dombey would have reasoned: That a matrimonial alliance with himself must, in the nature of things, be gratifying and honourable to any woman of common sense. That the hope of giving birth to a new partner in such a house, could not fail to awaken a glorious and stirring ambition in the breast of the least ambitious of her sex.
Now, Bella suspected by this time that Mr. Rokesmith admired her. Whether the knowledge (for it was rather that than suspicion) caused her to incline to him a little more, or a little less, than she had done at first; whether it rendered her eager to find out more about him, because she sought to establish reason for her distrust, or because she sought to free him from it; was as yet dark to her own heart. But at most times he occupied a great amount of her attention.
Then, at the end of every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this time forgotten all about the game.
One great blemish in the popular mind of America and the prolific parent of an innumerable brood of evils, is Universal Distrust . . . you no sooner set up an idol firmly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded . . . . Any man who attains a high place among you, from the President downwards, may date his downfall from that moment.
Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world – the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine. It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.
It was a very aged, ghostly place; the church had been built many hundreds of years ago, and had once had a convent or monastery attached; for arches in ruins, remains of oriel windows, and fragments of blackened walls, were yet standing-, while other portions of the old building, which had crumbled away and fallen down, were mingled with the churchyard earth and overgrown with grass, as if they too claimed a burying-place and sought to mix their ashes with the dust of men.
Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!
The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.
I never thought before, that there was a woman in the world who could affect me so much by saying so little. But don’t be hard in your construction of me. You don’t know what my state of mind towards you is. You don’t know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don’t know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON’T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it.
I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown people who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.
I don’t remember who was there, except Dora. I have not the least idea what we had for dinner, besides Dora. My impression is, that I dined off Dora, entirely, and sent away half-a-dozen plates untouched. I sat next to her. I talked to her. She had the most delightful little voice, the gayest little laugh, the pleasantest and most fascinating little ways, that ever led a lost youth into hopeless slavery. She was rather diminutive altogether. So much the more precious, I thought.
“Ay,” said the Captain, reverentially; “it’s a almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling. Think on it when the stormy nights is so pitch dark,” said the Captain, solemnly holding up his hook, “as you can’t see your hand afore you, excepting when the wiwid lightning reweals the same; and when you drive, drive, drive through the storm and dark, as if you was a driving, head on, to the world without end.”
One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.
You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since-on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with.
Blackened skeleton arms of wood by the wayside pointed upward to the convent, as if the ghosts of former travellers, overwhelmed by the snow, haunted the scene of their distress. Icicle-hung caves and cellars built for refuges from sudden storms, were like so many whispers of the perils of the place; never-resting wreaths and mazes of mist wandered about, hunted by a moaning wind; and snow, the besetting danger of the mountain, against which all its defences were taken, drifted sharply down.
If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me more courage.” As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young fingers, and touched his lips. “Are you dying for him?” she whispered. “And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.” “Oh, you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?” “Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.
The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
I can see others in the sunlight; I can see our boats’ crews and our athletic young men on the glistening water, or speckled with the moving lights of sunlit leaves; but I myself am always in the shadow looking on. Not unsympathetically, – God forbid! – but looking on alone, much as I looked at Sylvia from the shadows of the ruined house, or looked at the red gleam shining through the farmer’s windows, and listened to the fall of dancing feet, when all the ruin was dark that night in the quadrangle.
But the moon came slowly up in all her gentle glory, and the stars looked out, and through the small compass of the grated window, as through the narrow crevice of one good deed in a murky life of guilt, the face of Heaven shone bright and merciful. He raised his head; gazed upward at the quiet sky, which seemed to smile upon the earth in sadness, as if the night, more thoughtful than the day, looked down in sorrow on the sufferings and evil deeds of men; and felt its peace sink deep into his heart.
What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him.
Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came; and if the village had been beautiful at first, it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its richness. The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine, which lay stretched out beyond.
Of all the ruinous and desolate places my uncle had ever beheld, this was the most so. It looked as if it had once been a large house of entertainment; but the roof had fallen in, in many places, and the stairs were steep, rugged, and broken. There was a huge fire-place in the room into which they walked, and the chimney was blackened with smoke; but no warm blaze lighted it up now. The white feathery dust of burnt wood was still strewed over the hearth, but the stove was cold, and all was dark and gloomy.
If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.
Sir,” returned Mrs. Sparsit, ” I cannot say that i have heard him precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement. But on winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke. I have heard him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be heard in dutch clocks. Not,” said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty sense of giving strict evidence, ” That I would convey any imputation on his moral character. Far from it.
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana Wife of the Above”, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.
And how did little Tim behave?‚Äù asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart‚Äôs content. ‚ÄúAs good as gold,‚Äù said Bob, ‚Äúand better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.
Day was breaking at Plashwater Weir Mill Lock. Stars were yet visible, but there was dull light in the east that was not the light of night. The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars: while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to the stare of the dead.
The talker has found a hearer but not a listener; and though he may talk his very best for his own sake, you will find that his mental movements are erratic: they have no fixed centre and no definite object. His talk is like the water of a canal whose banks have given way, which rolls aimlessly hither and thither, without fulfilling any useful function, though it is the same water which was so helpful and serviceable, when it was confined within clearly marked limits by the restraining force of its earthy boundaries.
On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul…Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from which the blood will not be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great-grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be – no redder and no paler – no more and no less – always just the same.
There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space, when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.
Indeed the worthy housewife was of such a capricious nature, that she not only attained a higher pitch of genius than Macbeth, in respect of her ability to be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in an instant, but would sometimes ring the changes backwards and forwards on all possible moods and flights in one short quarter of an hour; performing, as it were, a kind of triple bob major on the peal of instruments in the female belfry, with a skilfulness and rapidity of execution that astonished all who heard her.
The first diabolical character who intruded himself on my peaceful youth (as I called to mind that day at Dullborough), was a certain Captain Murderer. This wretch must have been an off-shoot of the Blue Beard family, but I had no suspicion of the consanguinity in those times. His warning name would seem to have awakened no general prejudice against him, for he was admitted into the best society and possessed immense wealth. Captain Murderer’s mission was matrimony, and the gratification of a cannibal appetite with tender brides.
I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them-none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way.
How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilized nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy!
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer’s morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.
It is an exquisite and beautiful thing in our nature, that, when the heart is touched and softened by some tranquil happiness or affectionate feeling, the memory of the dead comes over it most powerfully and irresistibly. It would seem almost as though our better thoughts and sympathies were charms, in virtue of which the soul is enabled to hold some vague and mysterious intercourse with the spirits of those whom we loved in life. Alas! how often and how long may these patient angels hover around us, watching for the spell which is so soon forgotten!
The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes. Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the graves of those we loved: may purify our thoughts, and bear down before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers, in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time, which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down pride and worldliness beneath it.
You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell. What I mean is that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.

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About Charles Dickens

Quotes by Charles Dickens