The Old Curiosity Shop quotes

“And what made you ask it of me? Suppose I should tell you wrong.”

“I am sure you will not do that,” said the little creature, “you are such a very old gentleman, and walk so slow yourself.”

I cannot describe how much I was impressed by this appeal and the energy with which it was made, which brought a tear into the child’s clear eye, and made her slight figure tremble as she looked up into my face.

While we were thus engaged, I revolved in my mind a hundred different explanations of the riddle and rejected them every one. I really felt ashamed to take advantage of the ingenuousness or grateful feeling of the child for the purpose of gratifying my curiosity.

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

As I had felt pleased at first by her confidence I determined to deserve it, and to do credit to the nature which had prompted her to repose it in me.

The haggard aspect of the little old man was wonderfully suited to the place; he might have groped among old churches and tombs and deserted houses and gathered all the spoils with his own hands.

There was nothing in the whole collection but was in keeping with himself; nothing that looked older or more worn than he.

As he turned the key in the lock, he surveyed me with some astonishment which was not diminished when he looked from me to my companion. The door being opened, the child addressed him as grandfather, and told him the little story of our companionship.

“Why bless thee child” said the old man patting her on the head, “how couldst thou miss thy way—what if I had lost thee Nell!”

“I would have found my way back to you, grandfather,” said the child boldly; “never fear.”

The old man kissed her, and then turning to me and begging me to walk in, I did so. The door was closed and locked.

I entertained a grateful feeling towards the boy from that minute, for

I felt that he was the comedy of the child’s life.

“A long way, wasn’t it, Kit?” said the little old man.

“Fred,” said Mr. Swiveller stopping short as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, and speaking in the same audible whisper as before, “is the old min friendly?”

“What does it matter?” returned his friend peevishly.

“No, but is he?” said Dick.

Instead of pursuing the theme he had in his mind, Quilp rose, folded his arms again, and looked at her more sternly than before, while she averted her eyes and kept them on the ground.

“If ever you listen to these beldames again, I’ll bite you.”

With this laconic threat, which he accompanied with a snarl that gave him the appearance of being particularly in earnest, Mr. Quilp bade her clear the teaboard away, and bring the rum.

“I’ll tell you” returned his friend. “It’s very plain that the old man and I will remain at daggers-drawn to the end of our lives, and that I have nothing to expect from him. You see that, I suppose?”

“A bat might see that, with the sun shining,” said Dick.

“It’s equally plain that the money which the old flint—rot him—first taught me to expect that I should share with her at his death, will all be hers, is it not?”

In one of these rooms was a window looking into the street, where the child sat, many and many a long evening, and often far into the night, alone and thoughtful.

None are so anxious as those who watch and wait, and at these times, mournful fancies came flocking on her mind, in crowds.

She would take her station here at dusk, and watch the people as they passed up and down the street, or appeared at the windows of the opposite houses, wondering whether those rooms were as lonesome as that in which she sat, and whether those …

If we are beggars—!”

“What if we are,” said the child boldly. “Let us be beggars, and be happy.”

“Beggars—and happy!” said the old man. “Poor child!”

“Smoke away!” cried Quilp. “Never stop! You can talk as you smoke. Don’t lose time.”

“He he he!” cried Brass faintly, as he again applied himself to the odious pipe.

“But if he should get better Mr. Quilp?”

“He’s very bad,” replied the weeping child.

“What a pretty little Nell!” cried Quilp.

“Oh beautiful sir, beautiful indeed,” said Brass. “Quite charming.”

… and sorrow with little regard or sympathy even from the women about her, it is not surprising that the affectionate heart of the child should have been touched to the quick by one kind and generous spirit, however uncouth the temple in which it dwelt.

Thank Heaven that the temples of such spirits are not made with hands, and that they may be more worthily hung with poor patchwork than with purple and fine linen.

but he seemed unable to contemplate their real position more distinctly, and was still the listless, passionless creature, that suffering of mind and body had left him.

We call this a state of childishness, but it is the same poor hollow mockery of it, that death is of sleep.

Where, in the dull eyes of doting men, are the laughing light and life of childhood, the gaiety that has known no check, the frankness that has felt no chill, the hope that has never withered, the joys that fade in blossoming?

Where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber, telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come?

Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

church towers and steeples, frowning and dark at other times, now shone and dazzled in the sun; each humble nook and corner rejoiced in light; and the sky, dimmed by excessive distance, shed its placid smile on everything beneath.

Forth from the city, while it yet slumbered, went the two poor adventurers, wandering they knew not whither.

It was enough to leave dumb things behind, and objects that were insensible both to her love and sorrow. To have parted from her only other friend upon the threshold of that wild journey, would have wrung her heart indeed.

Why is it that we can better bear to part in spirit than in body, and while we have the fortitude to act farewell have not the nerve to say it?

On the eve of long voyages or an absence of many years, friends who are tenderly attached will separate with the usual look, the usual pressure of the hand, planning one final interview for the morrow, while each well knows that it is but a …

Men in their dungeons stretched their cramped cold limbs and cursed the stone that no bright sky could warm. The flowers that sleep by night, opened their gentle eyes and turned them to the day.

The light, creation’s mind, was everywhere, and all things owned its power.

The two pilgrims, often pressing each other’s hands, or exchanging a smile or cheerful look, pursued their way in silence.

In one so young, and so unused to the scenes in which she had lately moved this sinking of the spirit was not surprising. But,

Nature often enshrines gallant and noble hearts in weak bosoms⁠—oftenest, God bless her, in female breasts

—and when the child, casting her tearful eyes upon the old man, remembered how weak he was, and how destitute and helpless he would be if she failed him, her heart swelled within her, and animated her with new strength and fortitude.

“My favourite scholar!” said the poor schoolmaster, smoking a pipe he had forgotten to light, and looking mournfully round upon the walls.

“It is a little hand to have done all that, and waste away with sickness. It is a very, very, little hand!”

… him if there were ever such a day as that, when even the bees were diving deep down into the cups of flowers and stopping there, as if they had made up their minds to retire from business and be manufacturers of honey no more.

The day was made for laziness, and lying on one’s back in green places, and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one’s eyes and go to sleep

; and was this a time to be poring over musty books in a dark room, slighted by the very sun itself? Monstrous!

The poor schoolmaster sat in the same place, holding the small cold hand in his, and chafing it.

It was but the hand of a dead child. He felt that; and yet he chafed it still, and could not lay it down.

“Would they make much difference?” repeated his mistress. “They can’t be very heavy.”

“The weight o’ the pair, Mum,” said George, eyeing them with the look of a man who was calculating within half an ounce or so, “would be a trifle under that of Oliver Cromwell.”

Nell was very much surprised that the man should be so accurately acquainted with the weight of one whom she had read of in books as having lived considerably before their time, but speedily forgot the subject in the joy of hearing that they were …

“I never saw any waxwork ma’am,” said Nell. “Is it funnier than Punch?”

“Funnier!” said Mrs. Jarley in a shrill voice. “It is not funny at all.”

“Oh!” said Nell with all possible humility.

No low beatings and knockings about, no jokings and squeakings like your precious Punches, but always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and gentility; and so like life, that if waxwork only spoke and walked about, you’d hardly know the difference.

I won’t go so far as to say, that, as it is, I’ve seen waxwork quite like life, but I’ve certainly seen some life that was exactly like waxwork.

”

“

I seldom have anything else, child,

” replied Mrs. Jarley, with the air of a martyr. “I sometimes wonder how I bear it.”

but scarcely any passengers who seemed bent on going anywhere, or to have any object in view, went by; and if perchance some straggler did, his footsteps echoed on the hot bright pavement for minutes afterwards.

Nothing seemed to be going on but the clocks, and they had such drowsy faces, such heavy lazy hands, and such cracked voices, that they surely must have been too slow.

The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer’s shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in dusty corners of the window.

and houses of wood, many of them very old, with withered faces carved upon the beams, and staring down into the street. These had very little winking windows, and low-arched doors, and, in some of the narrower ways, quite overhung the pavement.

The streets were very clean, very sunny, very empty, and very dull.

A few idle men lounged about the two inns, and the empty marketplace, and the tradesmen’s doors, and some old people were dozing in chairs outside an almshouse wall;

“God help us!” cried the child. “Oh! what hard fortune brought us here!”

“Hush!” rejoined the old man laying his hand upon her mouth, “fortune will not bear chiding. We must not reproach her, or she shuns us; I have found that out.”

“Now, mister,” said the stout man. “If you’re not coming yourself, give us the cards, will you?”

… too near her fingers’ ends those particular statutes which regulate what are familiarly termed actions for breach, certain it is that she was still in a state of celibacy, and still in daily occupation of her old stool opposite to that of her brother Sampson.

And equally certain it is, by the way, that between these two stools a great many people had come to the ground.

One morning Mr. Sampson Brass sat upon his stool copying some legal process, and viciously digging his pen deep into the paper, as if he were writing upon the very heart of the party against whom it was directed;

Dick leant over the table, and descried a small slipshod girl in a dirty coarse apron and bib, which left nothing of her visible but her face and feet.

She might as well have been dressed in a violin-case.

“Why, who are you?” said Dick.

“Two weeks!” cried the single gentleman gruffly, eyeing him from top to toe.

“Two years. I shall live here for two years. Here. Ten pounds down. The bargain’s made.”

“Why, you see,” said Dick, “my name’s not Brass, and—”

Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the saltbox, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched upon.

The pinched and meagre aspect of the place would have killed a chameleon.

He would have known at the first mouthful that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the ghost in despair.—The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and hung her head.

It is no light matter—no outcry from the working vulgar, no mere question of the people’s health and comforts that may be whistled down on Wednesday nights.

In love of home, the love of country has its rise;

and who are truer patriots or the best in time of need—those who venerate the land, owning its wood, and stream, and earth, and all that they produce? or those who love their country, boasting not a foot of ground in all its wide domain?

with an inscription in chalk calling his mother’s attention to the circumstance, and informing her that it came from her dutiful son; and went his way, with a heart something heavier than his pockets, but free from any very great oppression notwithstanding.

Oh these holidays! why will they leave us some regret!

why cannot we push them back only a week or two in our memories, so as to put them at once at that convenient distance whence they may be regarded either with a calm indifference or a pleasant effort of recollection!

… already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months to come, though he would not be there.

Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.

However, the Sun himself is weak when he first rises, and gathers strength and courage as the day gets on.

Kit found it at last after some trouble, and pausing at the door to take breath that he might enter with becoming decency, passed into the chapel.

It was not badly named in one respect, being in truth a particularly little Bethel⁠—a Bethel of the smallest dimensions⁠—with a small number of small pews, and a small pulpit, in which a small gentleman (by trade a Shoemaker, and by calling a Divine) was delivering in a by no means small voice, a by no means small sermon

, judging of its dimensions by the condition of his audience, which, if their gross amount were but small, comprised a still smaller number of hearers, as the majority were slumbering.

But before they had reached the corner of the lane, the man came running after them, and pressing her hand, left something in it—two old, battered, smoke-encrusted penny pieces.

Who knows but they shone as brightly in the eyes of angels as golden gifts that have been chronicled on tombs?

And thus they separated; the child to lead her sacred charge further from guilt and shame, and the labourer to attach a fresh interest to the spot where his guests had slept; and read new histories in his furnace fire.

and as they drank with a great relish, and were naturally of a red-nosed, pimple-faced, convivial look, their presence rather increased than detracted from that decided appearance of comfort, which was the great characteristic of the party.

“If I could poison that dear old lady’s rum and water,” murmured Quilp, “I’d die happy.”

“Ah!” said Mr. Brass, breaking the silence, and raising his eyes to the ceiling with a sigh, “Who knows but he may be looking down upon us now!

Its very turning in the lock awoke a hollow sound, and when she entered with a faltering step, the echoes that it raised in closing, made her start.

Everything in our lives, whether of good or evil, affects us most by contrast.

If the peace of the simple village had moved the child more strongly, because of the dark and troubled ways that lay beyond and through which she had journeyed with such failing feet, what was the deep impression of finding herself alone in that solemn …

Some of these knights had their own weapons, helmets, coats of mail, hanging upon the walls hard by, and dangling from rusty hooks. Broken and dilapidated as they were, they yet retained their ancient form, and something of their ancient aspect.

Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes, long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves.

The child sat down in this old, silent place, among the stark figures on the tombs—they made it more quiet there, than elsewhere, to her fancy—and gazing round with a feeling of awe, tempered with a calm delight, felt that now she was happy, and …

the cattle grazing in the pasturage; the smoke, that, coming from among the trees, seemed to rise upward from the green earth: the children yet at their gambols down below—all, everything, so beautiful and happy.

It was like passing from death to life; it was drawing nearer Heaven.

The children were gone by the time she emerged into the porch, and locked the door. As she passed the schoolhouse she could hear the busy hum of voices. Her friend had begun his labours only that day.

“It has always been the same with me,” said Mr. Swiveller, “always. ’Twas ever thus—from childhood’s hour I’ve seen my fondest hopes decay, I never loved a tree or flower but ’twas the first to fade away.

I never nursed a dear Gazelle, to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardener.

”

“I respect you, Kit,” said Brass with emotion. “I saw enough of your conduct at that time to respect you, though your station is humble, and your fortune lowly.

It isn’t the waistcoat that I look at. It is the heart. The checks in the waistcoat are but the wires of the cage. But the heart is the bird.

Ah! How many sich birds are perpetually moulting, and putting their beaks through the wires to peck at all mankind!”

“Ah!” rejoins Mr. Brass, brimfull of moral precepts and love of virtue. “A charming subject of reflection for you, very charming. A subject of proper pride and congratulation, Christopher.

Honesty is the best policy.⁠—I always find it so myself. I lost forty-seven pound ten by being honest this morning. But it’s all gain, it’s gain!

”

Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent.

The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials, …

“Dead, all but,” replied the small servant. “

I never thought you’d get better. Thank Heaven you have!

”

… the conference on their joint behalf, or, prying and listening, had not been in such a mighty hurry to anticipate her (which he would not have been, but for his distrust and jealousy), he would probably have found himself much better off in the end.

Thus it will always happen that these men of the world, who go through it in armour, defend themselves from quite as much good as evil; to say nothing of the inconvenience and absurdity of mounting guard with a microscope at all times, and of wearing a coat of mail on the most innocent occasions.

The three gentlemen spoke together apart for a few moments. At the end of their consultation, which was very brief, the notary pointed to the writing materials on the table, and informed Mr.

The mist, though sluggish and slow to move, was of a keenly searching kind. No muffling up in furs and broadcloth kept it out.

It seemed to penetrate into the very bones of the shrinking wayfarers, and to rack them with cold and pains.

Everything was wet, and clammy to the touch. The warm blaze alone defied it, and leaped and sparkled merrily.

It seemed to penetrate into the very bones of the shrinking wayfarers, and to rack them with cold and pains. Everything was wet, and clammy to the touch. The warm blaze alone defied it, and leaped and sparkled merrily.

It was a day to be at home, crowding about the fire, telling stories of travellers who had lost their way in such weather on heaths and moors; and to love a warm hearth more than ever.

The dwarf’s humour, as we know, was to have a fireside to himself; and when he was disposed to be convivial, to enjoy himself alone.

Yes. Barbara is a great deal better. She is afraid—and here Barbara looks down and blushes more—that he must have thought her very foolish. “Not at all,” says Kit. Barbara is glad of that, and coughs—Hem!—just the slightest cough possible—not more than that.

What a discreet pony, when he chooses!

He is as quiet now, as if he were of marble. He has a very knowing look, but that he always has. “We have hardly had time to shake hands, Barbara” says Kit. Barbara gives him hers. Why, she is trembling now! Foolish, fluttering Barbara!

He is as quiet now, as if he were of marble. He has a very knowing look, but that he always has. “We have hardly had time to shake hands, Barbara” says Kit. Barbara gives him hers. Why, she is trembling now! Foolish, fluttering Barbara!

Arm’s length! The length of an arm is not much.

Barbara’s was not a long arm by any means, and besides, she didn’t hold it out straight, but bent a little. Kit was so near her when they shook hands, that he could see a small tiny tear, yet trembling on an eyelash.

Barbara’s was not a long arm by any means, and besides, she didn’t hold it out straight, but bent a little. Kit was so near her when they shook hands, that he could see a small tiny tear, yet trembling on an eyelash.

It was natural that he should look at it, unknown to Barbara.

It was natural that Barbara should raise her eyes unconsciously, and find him out. Was it natural that at that instant, without any previous impulse or design, Kit should kiss Barbara? He did it, whether or no.

It was natural that Barbara should raise her eyes unconsciously, and find him out. Was it natural that at that instant, without any previous impulse or design, Kit should kiss Barbara? He did it, whether or no.

Barbara said “for shame,” but let him do it too⁠—twice.

He might have done it thrice, but the pony kicked up his heels and shook his head, as if he were suddenly taken with convulsions of delight, and Barbara being frightened, ran away—not straight to where her mother and Kit’s mother were though, lest they …

“Nothing,” cried Barbara. And Barbara pouted—not sulkily, or in an ugly manner, but just enough to make her look more cherry-lipped than ever.

There is no school in which a pupil gets on so fast, as that in which Kit became a scholar when he gave Barbara the kiss.

He saw what Barbara meant now—he had his lesson by heart all at once—she was the book—there it was before him as plain as print.

A venerable building—grey, even in the midst of the hoary landscape. An ancient sundial on the belfry wall was nearly hidden by the snowdrift, and scarcely to be known for what it was.

Time itself seemed to have grown dull and old, as if no day were ever to displace the melancholy night.

A wicket gate was close at hand, but there was more than one path across the churchyard to which it led, and, uncertain which to take, they came to a stand again.