Inspiration Quotes, page 101

“Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold.”

“It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.”

“There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit, when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been.”

“The night wind has a dismal trick of wandering round and round such a building, moaning as it goes, trying with its unseen hand the windows and doors and seeking out crevices by which to enter.”

“Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.”

“If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his acquaintance.”

“My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the people governed is, on the whole, illimitable.”

“I have heard it said that as we keep our birthdays when we are alive, so the ghosts of dead people who are not easy in their graves keep the day they died upon.”

“Your voice and music are the same to me.”

“There was a frosty rime upon the trees, which, in the faint light of the clouded moon, hung upon the smaller branches like dead garlands.”

“At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.”

“Now I return to this young fellow. I must tell him that he has great expectations.”

“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself.”

“When the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel.”

“"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."”

“Foul weather didn't know where to have him.”

“I'm awful dull, but I hope I've beaten out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so, God bless you, dear old Pip, old chap — God bless you!”

“Gold, for the instant, lost its luster in his eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could never purchase.”

“I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable—indescribable; my misery amazing.”

“Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up...”

“What an immense impression Paris made upon me. It is the most extraordinary place in the world!”

“Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history.”

“I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes.”

“I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much with their noses. Perhaps they became the restless people they were in consequence.”

“Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that. That was the pudding.”

“We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.”

“There might be some credit in being jolly.”

“In London he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold nor to lie on beds of roses; he expected labour, he found it, he did it, and made the best of it. In this his prosperity consisted.”

“Their demeanor is invariably morose, sullen, clownish and repulsive. I should think there is not, on the face of the earth, a people so entirely destitute of humor, vivacity, or the capacity for enjoyment.”

“There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none.”