"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."
"In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life."
"Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion."
"I think I know the delights of freedom"
"The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done."
"The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind that he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him."
"She led me to believe we will going fast because her thoughts were going fast."
"It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain."
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
"I assumed my first undivided responsibility."
"It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home."
"Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing."
"There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe."
"There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all interest in romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance."
"When I went out, light of day seemed a darker color than when I went in."
"I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham’s. ‘Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip,’ said my guardian, comfortably satisfied beforehand on the general head, ‘because the man who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man."
"There was a long hard time when I kept far from me the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant of its worth."
"In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. He may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stance as many hands high according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter."
"Who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind!"
"He cross-examined his very wine when he had nothing else at hand."
"It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest necessaries, for everything that I remarked upon turned out to have been sent in on my account....Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being puffed up."
"After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal."
"Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it."
"Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart."
"He wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was very patriotic."