Quotes

There is another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before the close of the last century, and in which more than double the amount of seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs.

Fog everywhere. . . . The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Trifles make the sum of life.

A man must take the fat with the lean.

It’s only my child-wife.

Circumstances beyond my individual control.

“People can’t die, along the coast,” said Mr. Peggotty, “except when the tide’s pretty nigh out. They can’t be born, unless it’s pretty nigh in—not properly born, till flood. He’s a going out with the tide.”

A long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull altogether.

Ride on! Rough-shod if need be, smooth-shod if that will do, but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race!

Nobody’s enemy but his own.

The mistake was made of putting some of the trouble out of King Charles’s head into my head.

What a world of gammon and spinnage it is, though, ain’t it!

[ Uriah Heep speaking :] I’m a very umble person.

It’s a mad world. Mad as Bedlam.

I never will desert Mr. Micawber.

I have known him [Mr. Micawber] to come home to supper with a flood of tears, and a declaration that nothing was now left but a jail; and go to bed making a calculation of the expense of putting bow-windows to the house, “in case anything turned up,” which was his favorite expression.

“Wal’r, my boy,” replied the Captain, “in the Proverbs of Solomon you will find the following words, ‘May we never want a friend in need, nor a bottle to give him!’ When found, make a note of.”

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Keep up appearances whatever you do.

“Bother Mrs. Harris!” said Betsey Prig. . . . “I don’t believe there’s no sich a person!”

It was a turkey! He could never have stood upon his legs, that bird! He would have snapped ’em off short in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

“I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?” said Scrooge.

[ Of Tiny Tim :] As good as gold.

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,” said the Spirit. “Look upon me!”

“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge. . . . “No. Your past.”

[ Jacob Marley’s ghost speaking :] I wear the chain I forged in life.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire, secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.

It was a maxim with Foxey—our revered father, gentlemen—“Always suspect everybody.”

“Did you ever taste beer?” “I had a sip of it once,” said the small servant. “Here’s a state of things!” cried Mr. Swiveller. . . . “She never tasted it—it can’t be tasted in a sip!”

Codlin’s the friend, not Short.

“There are strings,” said Mr. Tappertit, “. . . in the human heart that had better not be wibrated.”

She’s the ornament of her sex.

A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing.

He has gone to the demnition bow-wows.

The unities, sir . . . are a completeness—a kind of universal dovetailedness with regard to place and time.

A demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body!

“C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, winder, a casement.” When the boy knows this out of the book, he goes and does it.

As she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would all be the same a hundred years hence.

Here’s richness!

[ Responding to being told that the law supposes a wife acts under a husband’s direction :] “If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, . . . “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law’s a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience—by experience.”

“Hard,” replied the Dodger. “As Nails,” added Charley Bates.

I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.

Anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said wen he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.

He avowed that among his intimate friends he was better known by the sobriquet of “The artful Dodger.”

She knows wot’s wot, she does.

They don’t mind it; it’s a regular holiday to them—all porter and skittles.