Mr. 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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
There is no such passion in human nature, as the passion for gravy among commercial gentlemen.
Think! I’ve got enough to do, and little enough to get for it, without thinking.
In the majority of cases, conscience is an elastic and very flexible article.
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.
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.
But injustice breeds injustice; the fighting with shadows and being defeated by them necessitates the setting up of substances to combat.
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!
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...
Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.
Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.
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.
Mrs. 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.
He was bolder in the daylight-most men are.