Coming before me, on this particular evening that I mention, mingled with the childish recollections and later fancies, the ghosts of half-formed hopes, the broken shadows of disappointments dimly seen and understood, the blending of experience and imagination, incidental to the occupation with which my thoughts had been busy, it was more than commonly suggestive.
If you bring the boy back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don’t look to me to put it together again.
You must know,’ said Estella, condescending to me as a beautiful and brilliant woman might, ’that I have no heart.
And so, as Tiny Tim said, ‘A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!
I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evremonde, but I have done nothing. I am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much good to us poor, will profit by my death; but I do not know how that can be, Citizen Evremonde.
The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.
It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was always coming, and never went away.
An ancient proverb warns us that we should not expect to find old heads upon young shoulders;.
The night crept on apace, the moon went down, the stars grew pale and dim, and morning, cold as they, slowly approached.
But she was a good plain sample of a nature that is ever, in the mass, better, truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, than the nature of men. And perhaps, unlearned as she was, she could have brought a dawning knowledge home to Mr. Dombey at that early day, which would not then have struck him in the end like lightning.
Pero el amor es ciego, y Nathaniel era bizco; y es posible que la suma de esas dos circunstancias le impidiese ver las cosas como son.
I shall always need you, because I shall always love you; but my need is no greater now, than at another time.
I have often thought that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
How could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?
Neither clock nor weather-glass is ever right; but we believe in both, devoutly.
The terrors that had assailed me whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had done.
Pride is not all of one kind.
It occurred to me several times that we should have got on better, if we had not been quite so genteel. We were so exceedingly genteel, that our scope was very limited.
It’s very much to be wished that some mothers would leave their daughters alone after marriage, and not be so violently affectionate. They seem to think that the only return that can be made them for bringing an unfortunate young woman into the world – God bless my soul, if she asked to be brought, or wanted to come! – is full liberty to worry her out of it again.
Of course I was in love with little Em’ly. I am sure I loved that baby quite as truly, quite as tenderly, with greater purity and more disinterestedness, than can enter into the best love of a later time of life, high and ennobling as it is.