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If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?
Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.”
I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.” “Thankee, my boy. I do.”
“And where the deuce ha’ you been?”
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.
with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when I met him coming up the lane.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a scholar you are! An’t you?”
“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage. “I don’t spell it at all,” said Joe.
My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. 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.
If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ‘em, Pip, and live well and die happy.”
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.
they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
“Am I pretty?” “Yes; I think you are very pretty.” “Am I insulting?” “Not so much so as you were last time,” said I. “Not so much so?” “No.” She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such force as she had, when I answered it. “Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?” “I shall not tell you.” “Because you are going to tell up stairs. Is that it?” “No,” said I, “that’s not it.” “Why don’t you cry again, you little wretch?” “Because I’ll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as false a declaration as ever was made;
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“Who let you in?” said he. “Miss Estella.” “Who gave you leave to prowl about?” “Miss Estella.” “Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.
“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause. “I don’t know,” I moodily answered. “Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think — but you know best — that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think — but you know best — she was not worth gaining over.”
“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me right.” “I wish I could!” said Biddy. “If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,— you don’t mind my speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?” “Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don’t mind me.” “If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.” “But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.
The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus.
“I’ll help you. You don’t deserve help, but I’ll help you.
And the communication I have got to make is, that he has Great Expectations.”
be brought up as a gentleman,— in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations.”
You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great expectations being encumbered with that easy condition.
You must know that, although I have used the term “expectations” more than once, you are not endowed with expectations only.
“Recollect yourself!” Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him for his recommendation
It would all come out in good time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron.
said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices.
I would not have listened for more, if I could have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.
in order that they might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great expectations,—
again feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this, the second night of my bright fortunes, should be as lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.
“Lord bless me, you’re the prowling boy!” “And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”
The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter —” “Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?” “At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she afterwards stopped all the clocks.
Mr. and Mrs. Pocket’s children were not growing up or being brought up, but were tumbling up.
The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and looked archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella’s eyes.
Estella looked more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.
“Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs. Stare them out of countenance.” “So I would, Handel, only they are staring me out of countenance.”
“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.” “Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since,— on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest
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Old Barley might be as old as the hills,
My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance,
It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its one dominant anxiety, towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a range of mountains, never disappeared from my view.
We had now got into the month of March.
The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death.
“Old Orlick’s a going to tell you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”
Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the face to talk thus to mine.
but with a sense of increasing relief as I drew nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness further and further behind.
“It’s my wedding-day!” cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, “and I am married to Joe!”
I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable majesty and its indescribable charm remained.
