No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

what I want you to be - I don't mean physically but morally: you are very well physically - is a firm fellow, a fine firm fellow, with a will of your own, with resolution. with determination. with strength of character that is not to be influenced except on good reason by anybody, or by anything. That's what I want you to be. That's what your father, & your mother might both have been

Spring is the time of year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries.

To close the eyes, and give a seemly comfort to the apparel of the dead, is poverty's holiest touch of nature.

Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them.