There's more of gravey than grave about you, whatever you are!" - Scrooge, referring to Marley's ghost which he believes is a hallucination from food poisoning

Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning.

This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in the churchyard, and I sitting on my bed, reading as if for life.

A word in earnest is as good as a speech.

I am what you designed me to be.I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt

The nephew revenges himself for this, by holding his breath and terrifying his kinswoman with the dread belief that he has made up his mind to burst. Regardless of whispers and shakes, he swells and becomes discoloured, and yet again swells and becomes discoloured, until the aunt can bear it no longer, but leads him out, with no visible neck, and with his eyes going before him like a prawn's.

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.