Charles Dickens

Quotes

• “But we should get the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did not see that Dickens was prim...”
• “The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No...”
• “Not much of Dickens will live, because it has no little correspondence to life. He was the incarnation of cockneydom, a ...”
• “His eye brings in almost too rich a harvest for him to deal with, and gives him an aloofness and a hardness which freeze...”
• “When people say Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me they can have no eyes and no ears. They probably have only notions o...”
• “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing ...”
• “It was a maxim with Mr. Brass that the habit of paying compliments kept a man's tongue oiled without any expense; and th...”
• “There were two classes of created objects which he held in the deepest and most unmingled horror: they were, dogs and ch...”
• “The Barnacles were a very high family, and a very large family. They were dispersed all over the public offices, and hel...”
• “When I was a child I devoured Dickens. I think there is hardly any volume of Dickens' work that I have not read. There w...”
• “But already the Utilitarian citadel had been more heavily bombarded on the other side by one lonely and unlettered man o...”
• “(Carmine Crocco) In such a crowd, so numerous and composed of such heterogeneous elements, it might have appeared almost...”
• “Little Dorrit is a more seditious book than Das Kapital. All over Europe men and women are in prison for pamphlets and s...”
• “In mind, she was of a strong and vigorous turn, having from her earliest youth devoted herself with uncommon ardour to t...”
• “I was always interested in fair play, probably from reading the works of Paul Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Charles Dicke...”
• “My own experience in reading Dickens...is to be bounced between violent admiration and violent distaste almost every cou...”
• “The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land,In England there shall be dear bread-in Ireland, sword...”
• “He had his literary weaknesses, Charles Dickens, but they were all dear, big, attractive ones, virtues grown a bit wild ...”
• “This is the artistic greatness of Dickens, before and after which there is really nothing to be said. He had the power o...”
• “I see the line of my stories being awfully simple. It's not that I want to write mysteries, I'm talking about something ...”
• “Dickens is greatest when most personal and lyrical, and... he is most lyrical when he puts himself in a child's place, a...”
• “What is the odds so long as the fire of soul is kindled at the taper of conwiviality, and the wing of friendship never m...”
• “A person who can't pay, gets another person who can't pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden l...”
• “I'm teaching Dickens now in my English class [at Berkeley], and the narrator is always an even distance away from the ot...”
• “I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it...”
• “North and South (by Elizabeth Gaskell) is really a very fine piece of work. A lot of North and South has that whole awfu...”
• “Of Dickens, dear friend, I know nothing. About a year ago, from idle curiousity, I picked up The Old Curiousity Shop, & ...”
• “He had no learning; he was not misled by the label on the bottle-for that is what learning largely meant in his time. He...”
• “I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional...”
• “I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as ...”
• “Mr. Augustus Minns was a bachelor, of about forty as he said - of about eight-and-forty as his friends said. He was alwa...”
• “Dickens was by far the best after-dinner speaker I have ever heard. , , , Mr. Parkinson, , and are good, but Dickens was...”
• “There is no contemporary English writer whose works are read so generally through the whole house, who can give pleasure...”
• “A mere sympathy for democratic merry-making and mourning will not make a man a writer like Dickens. But without that sym...”
• “Minerva House … was "a finishing establishment for young ladies," where some twenty girls of the ages from thirteen to n...”
• “Time was," he said, "when it was well to watch even your rising little star, and know in what quarter there were clouds,...”
• “He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes. He felt sure a better feeling, and much g...”
• “Colson Whitehead, Charles Dickens and Octavia Butler - fascinating writers who carved out their own dominions in literat...”
• “Wal'r, my boy," replied the Captain, "in the Proverbs of Solomon you will find the following words, 'May we never want a...”
• “One of the greatest books ever written in the English language was called Little Dorrit, and as soon as Englishmen reali...”
• “The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer's shop, forgot their wings and briskn...”
• “Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of man, and knew...”
• “How much longer are we English to assist foreign nations in misunderstand us, by holding up that ridiculous lay-figure o...”
• “Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny k...”
• “And if it's proud to have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts," Miss...”
• “Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives i...”
• “He had a fear of the dead, and of all inanimate things, rising up around him to claim him; it is the fear of the pre-emi...”
• “Dean Koontz, as quoted in Nick Gillespie & Lisa Snell, Contemplating Evil: Novelist Dean Koontz on Freud, fraud, and the...”
• “To procure a refreshing sneeze at anytime by merely stepping out on the staircase (Fortunate location of Dick Swivellers...”
• “I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measure...”