"He says-him as was here just now-'When..." - Quote by Charles Dickens

“The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.”

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.”

“I believe no satirist could breathe this air. If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us tomorrow, he would be hunted down. If you have any knowledge of our literature, and can give me the name of any man, American born and bred, who has anatomised our follies as a people, and not as this or that party; and who has escaped the foulest and most brutal slander, the most inveterate hatred and intolerant pursuit; it will be a strange name in my ears, believe me.”

“I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”

“Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.”

“O Time with your teethy years! You swallow up all things little by little in a slow-motion, wrinkling process of dying.”

“Father, you left me, but I never left you.”

“It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that everyone was forsaking me and going away from me.”

“Mother, you had me, but I never had you.”