"I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society". "If society were really decent, he would have been" - George Gissing

Poverty will make the best people bad, if it gets hard enough. Why there’s so much of it in the world, I’m sure I can’t see.

We all know perfectly well that happiness is the conscious exertion of individual powers

If one were as rich as those people! They pass so close to us; they see us, and we see them; but the distance between is infinity. They don’t belong to the same world as we poor wretches. They see everything in a different light; they have powers which would seem supernatural if we were suddenly endowed with them.