I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.
Interpretation
The quote evokes imagery of sadness and despair, using a damp window as a metaphor for emotional turmoil.
In this quote, Charles Dickens illustrates the powerful connection between the external environment and internal emotions. The dampness on the window, likened to a goblin's tears, symbolizes sorrow and evokes a sense of melancholy, emphasizing how our surroundings can reflect or influence our emotional states.
In practice
In a literary analysis discussion about how nature reflects emotions in Dickens' work.
I recollected one story there was in the village, how that on a certain night in the year (it might be that very night for anything I knew), all the dead people came out of the ground and sat at the heads of their own graves till morning.
A silent look of affection and regard when all other eyes are turned coldly away-the consciousness that we possess the sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us-is a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth could purchase, or power bestow.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of pleasure in theirs.
You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.
Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man's pockets.
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
I truly feel like my job is to make the shows. That's what I'm paid to do. It's somebody else's job to market them, and it's somebody else's job to pay attention to the ratings, because if I paid attention to all that, my head would explode.
My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
A woman drew her long black hair out tight, And fiddled whisper music on those strings, And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings, And crawled head downward down a blackened wall.
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