I hope,′ said Mr. Pickwick, ’that our volatile friend is committing no absurdities in that dickey behind.
There have been sore mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you.
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken – distinctly in his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life – when the weary passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night were gone.
In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease – a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke them.
Oh, yes, I know all about it,′ replied the girl, laughing hysterically; and shaking her head from side to side, with a poor assumption of indifference.
In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers’ warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his.
It is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.
I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, “to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?
I do not find it easy to get sufficiently far away from this Book, in the first sensations of having finished it, to refer to it with the composure which this formal heading would seem to require. My interest in it, is so recent and strong; and my mind is so divided between pleasure and regret –.
Peggotty always went to sleep with her chin upon the handle of the basket, her hold of which never relaxed; and I could not have believed unless I had heard her do it, that one defenceless woman could have snored so much.
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing compared to self-swindlers.
She is like the morning,” he said. “With that golden hair, those blue eyes, and that fresh bloom on her cheek, she is like the summer morning. The birds here will mistake her for it. We will not call such a lovely young creature as that, who is a joy to all mankind, an orphan. She is the child of the universe.
He had expected labour, and he found it, and did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.
Where, in the dull eyes of doating men, are the laughing light and life of childhood, the gaiety that has known no check, the frankness that has felt no chill, the hope that has never withered, the joys that fade in blossoming?
Among other public buildings in the town of Mudfog, it boasts of one which is common to most towns great or small, to wit, a workhouse, and in this workhouse there was born on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.
Physical diseases, engendered in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees; and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering, intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally without distinction.
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 vigour.
I was glad to be tenderly remembered, to be gently pitied, not to be quite forgotten.
Mr. Vholes’s office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall.
The worm does not his work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow creeping fire upon the living frame.