Chimney Sweeper Quotes

Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers come to dust.

The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one.

I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt; I am lean with seeing others eat - O that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone; then thou should'st see how fat I would be! But must thou sit and I stand? Come down, with a vengeance!

Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o' the great; Thou art past the tyrant's stroke: Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan; All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownéd be thy grave!

Everyone else in the world is sorry. Dare to be something more than that.

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

Our children, when young, are part of ourselves. When they grow up they are just other people.

There is genuine joy in being alone in the dark inside your own head with no outside distractions, where you can scramble from ledge to rocky ledge, hallooing happily in a vast, echoing cave; climbing hand over hand from ledge to ledge of facts and memories, picking up old gems and new: examining, comparing, putting them down again and reaching for the next.

It is always better, and far more rewarding, I have observed, to have someone else feel sorry for you, than to do the job yourself.

A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy,

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same. There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been.

London I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infants cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear How the Chimney-sweepers cry Every blackning Church appalls, And the hapless Soldiers sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlots curse Blasts the new-born Infants tear And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.

Dogger had once warned me to be wary of any man who introduced himself as 'Mr.' It was an honorific, he said, a mark of respect to be bestowed by others, but never, ever, under any circumstances, upon oneself.

I was proud of my strategy. It was one I had been saving for just such an occasion as this. Who can say no to a personal matter? Even God is curious about such things, which is why He listens to our prayers.

I must be honest about the fact that I'm made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I'd been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I'd have been born with wool instead of skin.

Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.

Was it wrong to be so deceitful? Well, yes, it probably was. But if God hadn’t wanted me to be the way I am, He would have arranged to have me born a haddock instead of Flavia de Luce—wouldn’t He?

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.

And this must be our little Flavia!' On paper the man was already dead.

There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.

The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.

The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.

Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure.

Duty is the best and wisest of all teachers.

There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.

Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round.

At length it became high time to remember the first clause of that great discovery made by the ancient philosopher, for securing health, riches, and wisdom; the infallibility of which has been for generations verified by the enormous fortunes constantly amassed by chimney-sweepers and other persons who get up early and go to bed betimes.

One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you’re in Bishop’s Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction.

I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction.

I had suddenly become aware of my hands, which meant only one thing: It was time to say my farewells and make a graceful—or at least dignified—exit. Dogger had once told me, 'Your hands know when it's time to go.' And he had been right. The hands are the canaries in one's own personal coal mine: They need to be watched carefully and obeyed. A fidget demands attention, and a full-blown not-knowing-what-to-do-with-them means 'Vamoose!

As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.

We were all of us like the proverbial ships that pass in the night, signaling only briefly to one another before sailing off over the horizon into our own patch of darkness.

...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

As I am now, so you must be, So Friend, prepare to follow me

There are times when eyebrows speak louder than words.

As I let myself in, my nostrils were filled with musty but pleasant air, as if the books themselves were breathing in their sleep in the unventilated room.

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never the the same.

No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me. Life among the dead. This was where I was meant to be!

Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust,

No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me. Life among the dead. This was where I was meant to be! What a revelation! And what a place to have it! I could succeed at whatever I chose. I could, for instance, become an undertaker. Or a pathologist. A detective, a gravedigger, a tombstone maker, or even the world's greatest murderer. Suddenly the world was my oyster—even if it was a dead one.

None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I began to realize why librarians were sometimes able to achieve such pinnacle levels of crankiness: It's because they're in agony.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun Nor the furious winter's rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must As chimney sweepers come to dust

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious winter’s rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must As chimney sweepers come to dust

Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she's got.

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture? Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through. I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep![a] So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep. There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head, That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said, "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair." And so he was quiet; and that very night, As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, - That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black. And by came an angel who had a bright key, And he opened the coffins and set them all free; Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in a river, and shine in the sun. Then naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind; And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father, and never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags and our brushes to work. Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm; So if all do their duty they need not fear harm. - "The Chimney Sweeper

I knew that hunched shoulders, hanging hair, and eyes on the ground were fairly reliable signs of a girl dejected, a girl who needed to be approached and jollied into a nice talk or a nice cup of tea; whereas a back-flung head, with eyes closed and a secret smile on the upturned face, was the signal of someone who needed to be left alone with her thoughts.

I would have never have thought it possible, but I missed my sister. She had been the lemon on my fish, the vinegar on my chips, I realized with a sudden pang, and without her, life from now on was going to be less tasty." Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust.

There is always something vaguely unsettling about being alone in an empty building that is not your own. It is as if, whenever present inhabitants are away, the phantoms of former owners come shimmering out of the woodwork to protect their territory. Although you cannot see these ghosts, you can certainly feel their unwelcoming presence, and sometimes even smell them: a sort of shivering in the air that tells you that you're not alone and not wanted.

A conversation between a person of my age and one of hers is like a map of a maze: There are things that each of us knows, and that each of us knows the other knows, that can be talked about. But there are things that each of us knows that the other doesn't know we know, which must not be spoken of, no matter what. Because of our ages, and for reasons of decency, there are what Daffy would refer to as taboos: forbidden topics which we may stroll among like islands of horse dung in the road that, although perfectly evident to both of us, must not be mentioned or kicked at any cost. It's a strange world when you come right down to it.

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same. There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place. Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar might have decided he was outnumbered and fled under full sail to fight another day. I thought for a few moments about these two instances, and then I knocked on Miss Fawlthorne’s door. The hollow sound of knuckles on wood echoed ominously from the

Defending oneself by hiding behind the rules was a clever trick, like using a mouse to stampede the enemy's elephants and causing them to trample him to death.

And because I am happy, and dance and sing, They think they have done me no injury.

But it was not to be. I was me... She was she... and the world was the world- as I had sourly suspected all along.

Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place.

I threw my hands up into the air and launched myself into a series of exuberant triple cartwheels. “Yaroo!” I shouted.

Dear Miss Fawlthorne, I wrote. I was here but you were not. Perfect! Brief but informative, with just a pinch of accusation.

There's something in human nature, I'm beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It's like looking--or talking--through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken. [...] Perhaps only J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, saw through dimly to the truth: that by the time we are old enough to protest such rotten injustice, we have already forgotten it.

That was just it, wasn’t it? That’s what we were: dwellers all in time and space. Not old scraps of iron lashed together like a Meccano set by some invisible builder—not on your bloody life!

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun Nor the furious winter’s rages, Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must As chimney sweepers come to dust “Per aspera, ad astra,” my Golden friends whisper, even Sevro. And with a press of a button, Roque disappears from our lives to begin his last journey to join Ragnar and generations of fallen warriors in the sun.

A little black thing among the snow Crying 'weep, 'weep, in notes of woe! Where are thy father & mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath, And smil'd among the winter's snow; They clothed me in the clothes of death, And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy, & dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury, And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King, Who make up a heaven of our misery.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust,” which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.

How could I possibly learn to survive in such a pagan place, where trams were streetcars, vans and lorries were trucks, pavements were sidewalks, jumpers were sweaters, petrol was gasoline, aluminium was aluminum, sweets were candy, a full stop was a period, and cheerio was goodbye?

Water!” Miss Moate called out loudly, clapping her hands, and we all turned our attention toward her. “Water is life. Remember that, girls, and remember it well. You can live without food and sunlight for a remarkably long while, but you cannot live without water. You must know at all times and in all places how to acquire water.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Harnung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,—more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations.

Insensitive people are powerful and the thoroughly thick-skinned are the most powerful. They make the best tyrants.

The greater good? Did such a thing exist? And even if it did, who was in charge of deciding what it was?

Reformers and friendly societies spent more than a century trying to ban climbing until finally a boy named George Brewster suffered a horrific death on the job. The ensuing scandal changed the tide of public opinion and led to the passing of the Chimney Sweepers Act 1875—at long last marking the end of climbing across England.

She’s only been here a year and she’s already as rich as Croesus.

In 1788, the Chimney Sweepers Act was passed in Parliament, preventing master sweeps from employing children under eight (children over eight were allowed to be apprenticed).

Cornelia Corwin, 1907–1944,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ You’d think she was some wealthy family’s chambermaid, wouldn’t you—or perhaps a nanny? But she wasn’t. She was one of us. Without Cornelia Corwin there would have been no successful evacuation of Dunkirk. Three hundred thousand men would have perished in vain.” She bent over and gently brushed

Stalin’s position seems ambiguous here: one can imagine a Stalinist purge as the effort to liquidate all chimney sweepers who disturb socialist harmony – but was Stalin himself also not the supreme sweeper?

I. Serenity ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ By William Shakespeare (1564–1616) From ‘Cymbeline’, Act IV. Scene 2 FEAR no more the heat o’ the sun, Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages; Golden lads and girls all must, 5 As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o’ the great, Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke; Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak: 10 The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; 15 Thou hast finish’d joy and moan: All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee, and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! 20 Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have; And renownèd be thy grave!

There's something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking, or talking, through a kind of word telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken. Has no one ever noticed this but me? If not, then I’m happy to take the credit for being the first to point it out.

The place was a vast, echoing mausoleum, the walls pitted everywhere with pointed, painted nooks and alcoves, some in the shape of seashells, which looked as if they had once housed religious statuary, but the pale saints and virgins, having been evicted, had been replaced with brass castings of sour-faced, whiskered old men in beaver hats with their hands jammed into the breasts of their frock coats.

Her whole life would have been different. Her whole life had hung on whether or not a man walked down a garden path and slipped on ice. If he hadn’t slipped, she would have married someone else, lived in different places, had different children, perhaps even been happy. It was a dreadful thought.

Having someone else in the house, a large, clever, overbearing yet indifferent presence, mitigates loneliness not at all.

Ghosts are most often seen by girls, and certain young men with an iron deficiency.