God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all. — A Christmas Carol

"Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I dont mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Countrys done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

"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."

"Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? Youre poor enough." "Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? Youre rich enough."

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "Every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round — apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."