Quotes from Bleak House

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river.

Not to put too fine a point upon it.

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.

The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession.

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

Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!

And that they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—.

She was a pretty, very diminutive, plump woman of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if—I am quoting Richard again—they could see nothing nearer than Africa!

Never have a mission, my dear child.

You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy!

It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the people bless him. I never lie down at night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. Is not this to be rich?

My Lady Dedlock says she has been "bored to death."

This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.

I had always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, oh, no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I should like to understand it better.