This is the Court of Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic... in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the rounds of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might;the means abundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who does not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was like traveling into a far country, such as I had never expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me that... I never had heard the town clock strike before, nor the evening sounds of the village; for we slept with the windows open, which were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn,--a wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I had never seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Connie, all my life I kept trying to go up in society where everything was legal, straight.... But the higher I go the crookeder i...t becomes. Where the hell does it end?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »