"Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?"
" Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces--and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper-- love her, love her, love her!"
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined her to her utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round my neck swell with the vehemence that possesed her.
"Hear me, Pip! I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she may be loved. Love her!"
She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she meant to say it, but the often-repeated word had been hate instead of love---despair---revenge---dire death---it could not have sounded from her lips more like a curse.
"I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, "what real love is. It is blind devotion, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter---as I did!"
Miss Havisham, of Estella, her adopted child.
Great Expectations by Mr. Charles Dickens
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how differant its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that never would have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."
Pip, of his first day with Miss Havisham.
Great Expectations by Mr. Charles Dickens