“I was not so old as you are now when I first had to win my food, and do this out of this determination, and I have never slackened in it since.”

Looking back on the discipline that shaped his working life · Letter to Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, 1868

• Hope
• Memory

“I shall never recall you as a mere public audience, but rather as a host of personal friends, and ever with the greatest gratitude, tenderness, and consideration.”

Transforming the relationship between performer and audience into remembered friendship · Speech, New York, 20 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“Be assured, however, that you will not pass from my mind.”

Promising that separation will not erase affection or remembrance · Speech, New York, 20 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“I say it purely in remembrance of, and in homage to, the great public heart before me.”

Paying tribute to the collective generosity of his audience · Speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“My departure begins here, too; for I assure you that I have never until this moment really felt that I am going away.”

Capturing the moment when an impending farewell becomes emotionally real · Speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Memory
• Time

“My gracious and generous welcome in America, which can never be obliterated from my remembrance, began here.”

Remembering Boston as the beginning of an enduring public bond · Speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“Whatever little cunning of hand or head I took to it, or acquired in it, I have so retained as that I fully believe I could resume it to-morrow, very little the worse from long disuse.”

Expressing pride in professional skills retained over decades · Speech, London, 20 May 1865

• Art
• Memory

“I went into the gallery of the House of Commons as a parliamentary reporter when I was a boy not eighteen, and I left it—I can hardly believe the inexorable truth—nigh thirty years ago.”

Looking back on the reporting work that preceded his literary fame · Speech, London, 20 May 1865

• Fame
• Memory
• Time

“We are all of us in the habit of saying in our every-day life, that “We never know the value of anything until we lose it.” Let us try the newsvendors by the test.”

Applying a familiar truth about loss to overlooked everyday services · Speech, London, 9 May 1865

• Memory
• Time

“This watch, with which you have presented me, shall be my companion in my hours of sedentary working at home, and in my wanderings abroad.”

Linking a gift with future work, travel and remembrance · Speech, Coventry, 4 December 1858

• Memory
• Time

“Let the child have its fables; let the man or woman into which it changes, always remember those fables tenderly.”

Defending childhood imagination as something adults should preserve in memory · Speech, Manchester, 3 December 1858

• Childhood
• Memory

“Every traveller has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”

Suggesting that absence can deepen appreciation of home · Speech, London, 30 December 1854

• Home
• Memory

“Surely, then, the gardener who produces shapes and objects so lovely and so comforting, should have some hold upon the world’s remembrance when he himself becomes in need of comfort.”

Arguing that those who create beauty deserve care in their own need · Speech, London, 14 June 1852

• Beauty
• Memory
• Nature

“I would rather be able to say I knew it in its swaddling-clothes, than in maturer age.”

Expressing affection for an undertaking at its vulnerable beginning · Speech, Birmingham, 28 February 1844

• Hope
• Memory

“I believe I shall never hear the name of this capital of Scotland without a thrill of gratitude and pleasure.”

Linking place with lasting gratitude and affectionate memory · Speech, Edinburgh, 25 June 1841

• Joy
• Memory

“I shall love while I have life her people, her hills, and her houses, and even the very stones of her streets.”

Expressing an enduring affection for Scotland and its people · Speech, Edinburgh, 25 June 1841

• Love
• Memory

“When your Christmas letter did not arrive according to custom, I felt as if a bit of Christmas had fallen out and there was no supplying the piece.”

A warm image for the way friendship becomes part of cherished seasonal ritual · Letter to M. de Cerjat, 3 January 1855

• Friendship
• Joy
• Memory

“But it is my consolation that the spirit of the bright faces, the quick perception, the ready response, the generous and the cheering sounds that have made this place delightful to me, will remain.”

Finding consolation in memories that outlast departure · Farewell speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Friendship
• Memory

“In this brief life of ours, it is sad to do almost anything for the last time.”

A concise reflection on farewell, finality and the brevity of life · Farewell speech, Boston, 8 April 1868

• Memory
• Mortality
• Time

“No European sky without, and no cheerful home or well-warmed room within shall ever shut out this land from my vision.”

A vivid promise to preserve the memory of America after his return home · Speech, New York, 18 February 1842

• Friendship
• Memory

“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

Encouraging gratitude rather than fixation on former troubles · Novella, A Christmas Carol

• Hope
• Joy
• Memory