Susan in NC’s Reviews > Great Expectations > Status Update

“What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust… When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.”

“ So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.”

“Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

“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...Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me.”

“ Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.”