The year end brings no greater pleasure then the opportunity to express to you season's greetings and good wishes. May your holidays and new year be filled with joy.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

I have tried to resign myself, and to console myself; and that, I hope, I may have done imperfectly; but what I cannot firmly settle in my mind is, that the end will absolutely come. I hold her hand in mine, I hold her heart in mine, I see her love for me, alive in all its strength. I cannot shut out a pale lingering shadow of belief that she will be spared.

The present representative of the Dedlocks is an excellent master.He supposes all his dependents to be utterly bereft of individual characters, intentions or opinions, and is persuaded that he was born to supersede the necessity of their having any.If he were to make a discovery to the contrary, he would be simply stunned - would never recover himself, most likely, except to gasp and die.

Did it ever strike you on such a morning as this that drowning would be happiness and peace?

If an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against him: he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day repent of the connection he formed in early life; and she may have the pain and torture of knowing that he does so.

I must do something or I shall wear my heart away.