Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Bleak House quotes
10 quotes from Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #1023 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
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.
The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself.
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.
We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough.
I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages, for I know I am not clever.
It is a melancholy truth that even great men have their poor relations.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar.
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!
— Spoken by a character · VI. Quite at Home
I don’t feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity.
— Spoken by a character · VI. Quite at Home