Charles Dickens

Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects, and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us

The mother who lay in the grave, was the mother of my infancy; the little creature in her arms, was myself, as I had once been, hushed for ever on her bosom.

Any capitalist . . . who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn't each make sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every one for not accomplishing the little feat. What I did you can do. Why don't you go and do it?

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.

The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,___o be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.

My meaning is, that no man can expect his children to respect what he degrades.

. . . 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.

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas when the Great Creator was a child himself.

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.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither my friend, neither. It's number one. (Fagin)

Give me a moment, because I like to cry for joy. It's so delicious, John dear, to cry for joy.

The mental agony I have suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I have lightly formed. On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! 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. Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.

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.

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.

You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,_ said Miss Pross, in her breathing. __evertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.

. . . 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 . . .