“Death may beget life, but oppression can beget nothing other than itself.”

“My heart is set as firmly as ever the 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.”

“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.”

“I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”

“I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me unto death.”

“But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.”

“Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”

“And O, there are days in this life worth life and worth death.”

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together; and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Divisions.”

“She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad. And that’s important—you know.”

“In seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the disease — a terrible passing inclination to die of it.”

“There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair.”

“Trifles make the sum of life.”

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces - and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper - love her, love her, love her!”

“True love believes everything, and bears everything, and trusts everything.”

“Never say never.”

“To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.”

“Don't make promises if you have no intention of fulfilling them.”

“I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt; and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there — no sympathy, sentiment, nonsense.”

“The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the grain.”

“The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.”

“My guiding star always is: get hold of portable property.”

“It is the last straw that breaks the camel's back.”

“Some people are nobody's enemies but their own.”

“There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.”

“For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.”

“Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that providence must sleep.”

“There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.”

“Have I yet to learn that the hardest and best-borne trials are those that are never chronicled in any earthly record and are suffered every day.”

“Let me see you ride a donkey over my green again, and as sure as you have a head upon your shoulders, I'll knock your bonnet off, and tread upon it!”

“I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much.”

“Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.”

“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.”

“To the eye it is fair enough here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering.”

“There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.”

“The plain rule is to do nothing in the dark, to be a party to nothing underhanded or mysterious, and never to put his foot where he cannot see the ground.”

“Sudden shifts and changes are no bad preparation for political life.”

“Train up a fig tree in the way it should go; when you are old, sit under its shade.”

“I wear the chain I forged in life, replied the ghost. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

“"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of things that may be only?" The Ghost pointed to the grave. "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"”

“"Anything for the quick life," the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.”

“I confess I have yet to learn that a lesson of the purest good may not be drawn from the vilest evil.”

“Circumstances beyond my individual control.”

“I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here, though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled.”

“As an emotion of the mind will express itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the soul to be stronger than the sun.”

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

“My life is one damned, horrid grind.”

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”