David Copperfield

the best wish I can leave you is that you may come to be ashamed of what you have done today. At present I would prefer to see you anything rather than a friend, to me, or to anyone in whom I feel an interest.’

Thus, through the reflection that it might have been, I arrived at the conviction that it could never be.

But I kept my own counsel, and I did my work.

you do not look forward far enough. You are bound, in justice to your family, if not to yourself, to take in at a comprehensive glance the extremest point in the horizon to which your abilities may lead you.’

bide the time when all of us shall be alike in quality afore our God!’

I think of every little trifle between me and Dora, and feel the truth, that trifles make the sum of life.

Between these two irreconcilable conclusions: the one, that what I felt was general and unavoidable; the other, that it was particular to me, and might have been different: I balanced curiously,

yielded himself up to the one aim of his devoted life, and went on, with that hushed concentration of his faculties which would have made his figure solitary in a multitude.

I really feel almost ashamed of having known that he was not quite in his wits, taking account of the utmost I have done with mine.

‘this is indeed a meeting which is calculated to impress the mind with a sense of the instability and uncertainty of all human—in short, it is a most extraordinary meeting.