"I can't go into a long explanation before company; but I couldn't help it, upon my honour."Upon your what?" growled Sikes, with excessive disgust. "Here! Cut me off a piece of that pie, one of you boys,to take the taste of that out of my mouth, or it'll choke me dead."

"Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions."

"Life is made of ever so many partings welded together."

"She led me to believe we will going fast because her thoughts were going fast."

"This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in."

"The great principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what they don't want; and then they get tired of coming."

"He had but one eye and the pocket of prejudice runs in favour of two."

"I think I know the delights of freedom."

"It's my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained."

"My impression is, after many years of consideration, that there never can have been anybody in the world who played worse."

"The society of girls is a very delightful thing, Copperfield. It's not professional, but it's very delightful."

"Because if it is to spite her,' Biddy pursued, '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."

"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!"

"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."

"There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more substantial rewards they offer, acquire peculiar value and dignity from the coats and waistcoats connected with them. A field-marshal has his uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle his cocked hat. Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his hat and lace; what are they? Men. Mere men. Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine."

"There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk."

"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."

"When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come topeace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and findsuch a blessed sense of rest!"

"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."

"They're so fond of Liberty in this part of the globe, that they buy her and sell her and carry her to market with 'em. They've such a passion for Liberty, that they can't help taking liberties with her."

"Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal."

"Never say never."

"But that, in shutting out the light of day, 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, I knew equally well. 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?"

"I have a pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!"

"To have all those noble Romans alive before me, and walking in and out for my entertainment, instead of being the stern taskmasters they had been at school, was a most novel and delightful effect."

"So, 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."

"... 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!"

"I assumed my first undivided responsibility."

"Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts."

"I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore " yes, I do well."

"May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?"

"During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds."

"The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."

"Charity begins at home, and justice begins next door."

"He gave it its present name, and lived here shut up: day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit, and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close. In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door. When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too; it was so shattered and ruined."

"A new heart for a New Year, always!"

"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 was once a king, and he had a queen; and he was the manliest of his gender, and she was the loveliest of hers. They had nineteen children, and were always having more."

"When a man bleeds inwardly, it is a dangerous thing for himself; but when he laughs inwardly, it bodes no good to other people."

"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."

"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."

"There are a good many books, are there not, my boy? said Mr. Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling."A great number, sir, replied Oliver; "I never saw so many."You shall read them if you behave well, said the old gentleman kindly; "and you will like that, better than looking at the outsides, - that is, in some cases, because there are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."

"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."

"Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again."

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