Bleak House

by Charles Dickens

As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means.

the empty court is locked up. If all the injustice it has committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre—why so much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce!

But the evil of it is that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.

old as the hills,

How Alexander wept when he had no more worlds to conquer, everybody knows—or

She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its autumn.

He is of what is called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any school that seems never to have been young—and

“Let her fly away in a high wind on a broomstick!”

excellent dinner, if it had had any cooking to speak of, but it was almost raw.

I wonder the very paving-stones opposite our house can have the patience to stay there and be a witness of such inconsistencies and contradictions as all that sounding nonsense, and Ma’s management!”

Youth, and hope, and beauty are very seldom there. It is a long, long time since I had a visit from either.”

But she was not to be so easily left.

“You see,” said the old man, stopping and turning round, “they—Hi! Here’s lovely hair! I have got three sacks of ladies’ hair below, but none so beautiful and fine as this. What colour, and what texture!” “That’ll do, my good friend!” said Richard, strongly disapproving of his having drawn one of Ada’s tresses through his yellow hand. “You can admire as the rest of us do without taking that liberty.”

Krook shrunk into his former self as suddenly as he had leaped out of it.

And all’s fish that comes to my net.

‘For,’ says he, ‘it’s being ground to bits in a slow mill; it’s being roasted at a slow fire; it’s being stung to death by single bees; it’s being drowned by drops; it’s going mad by grains.’

dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if poverty had gripped it,

needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man.

and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in—the

The dying ashes have no light to spare,

shell. As easily might the tone of a delicate musical instrument be inferred from its case, as the tone of Mr. Tulkinghorn from his case.