David Copperfield

by Charles Dickens

though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy.

“Do you recollect the date,” said Mr. Dick, looking earnestly at me, and taking up his pen to note it down, “when King Charles the First had his head cut off?” I said I believed it happened in the year sixteen hundred and forty-nine. “Well,” returned Mr. Dick, scratching his ear with his pen, and looking dubiously at me. “So the books say; but I don’t see how that can be. Because, if it was so long ago, how could the people about him have made that mistake of putting some of the trouble out of his head, after it was taken off, into mine?”

Delusion, halucination

“What do you think of that for a kite?” he said. I answered that it was a beautiful one. I should think it must have been as much as seven feet high. “I made it. We’ll go and fly it, you and I,” said Mr. Dick. “Do you see this?” He showed me that it was covered with manuscript, very closely and laboriously written; but so plainly, that as I looked along the lines, I thought I saw some allusion to King Charles the First’s head again, in one or two places. “There’s plenty of string,” said Mr. Dick, “and when it flies high, it takes the facts a long way. That’s my manner of diffusing ’em. I don’t know where they may come down. It’s according to circumstances, and the wind, and so forth; but I take my chance of that.”

Way of distancing oneself with intrusive thoughts

There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose.”

I had considered how the things that never happen, are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished.