Circumstances beyond my individual control.

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.

Skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape.

Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.

As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, - or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process - not to be traced by any human sense, - an awful likeness of himself!