“The only subject ... on which he (Mr. Peggotty - M. Zh.) ever showed a violent temper or swore an oath, was this generosity of his; and if it were ever referred to ... he struck the table a heavy blow with his right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful oath that he would be "Gormed" if he didn't cut and run for good, if it was ever mentioned again. It appeared ... that nobody had the least idea of the etymology of this terrible verb passive to be gormed; but that they all regarded it constituting a most solemn imprecation." (Chapter III)”

“The pony preserved his character for independence and principle down to the last moment of his life; which was an unusually long one, and caused him to be looked upon, indeed, as the very Old Parr of ponies. He often went to and fro with the little phaeton between Mr. Garland's and his son's, and, as the old people and the young were frequently together, had a stable of his own at the new establishment, into which he would walk of himself with surprising dignity. He condescended to play with the children, as they grew old enough to cultivate his friendship, and would run up and down the little paddock with them like a dog; but though he relaxed so far, and allowed them such freedoms as caresses, or even to look at his shoes or hang on by his tail, he never permitted anyone among them to mount his back or drive him; thus showing that even their familiarity must have its limits, and that there were points between them far too serious for trifling. He was not unsusceptible of warm attachments in his later life, for when the good Bachelor came to live with Mr. Garland upon the clergyman's decease, he conceived a great friendship for him, and amiably submitted to be driven by his hands without the least resistance. He did no work for two or three years before he died, but lived on clover; and his last act (like a choleric old gentleman) was to kick his doctor.”

“Now, I know I’m going to break your hearts, but I am forced to leave you. You must call up all your fortitude, and try to bear it... “Bob swore!” - as the Englishman said for “Good night”, when he first learnt French, and thought it so like English. “Bob swore,” my ducks!" (Chapter XXII)”

“From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly. As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.”

“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”

“He was nothing to me and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing him well.”

“He then begs to make his dear Twemlow known to his two friends, Mr. Boots and Mr. Brewer - and clearly has no distinct idea which is which.”