On Dickens Quotes

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our
spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship
the spine and its tingle. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

(On Dickens) No other writer is quite as good at making marriage vows about remaining together "till death us do part" sound more like a suicide pact. ~ Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters. ~ Burn Gorman

We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots. ~ Siri Hustvedt

There is only one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish. ~ Charles Dickens

I stood upon a chair when I was left alone, and looked into the glass to see how red my eyes were, and how sorrowful my face. I considered, after some hours were gone, if my tears were really hard to flow now, as they seemed to be, what, in connection with my loss, it would affect me most to think of when I drew near home - for I was going home to the funeral. I am sensible of having felt that a dignity attached to me among the rest of the boys, and that I was important in my affliction. If ever child were stricken with sincere grief, I was. But I remember that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to me, when I walked in the playground that afternoon while the boys were in school. When I saw them glancing at me out of the windows, as they went up to their classes, I felt distinguished, and looked more melancholy, and walked slower. ~ Charles Dickens

Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates, Good heaven! ~ Charles Dickens

"A child!" said Edith, looking at her. "When was I a child? What childhood did you ever leave to me? I was a woman - artful, designing, mercenary, laying snares for men - before I knew myself, or you, or even understood the base and wretched aim of every new display I learnt. You gave birth to a woman. Look upon her. She is in her pride tonight." ~ Charles Dickens

I nowadays have the feeling that not only are most bookmen are eccentrics, but even the act they support
reading
is itself an eccentricity now, if a mild one. Interrupted narrative has become a natural thing. One could argue that Dickens and the other popular, serially published nineteenth-century novelists started this, and the television commercial made interruption come to seem normal. But the silicon chip has accelerated the process of interruption beyond all reckoning: iPods, Blackberries, laptops all break narrative into shorter and shorter sequences. ~ Larry McMurtry

If man would help some of us a little more, God would forgive us all the sooner perhaps.' But ~ Charles Dickens

No, the office is one thing, and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. ~ Charles Dickens

Why?" said Stryver. "Now, I'll put you in a corner," forensically shaking a forefinger at him. "You are a man of business and bound to have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't you go?" "Because," said Mr. Lorry, ~ Charles Dickens

'Joker' was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children's book, and that eventually became 'Noel.' And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.' ~ Lee Bermejo

Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you, because you are such an insensible dog." "And you," returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, "are such a sensitive and poetical spirit - ~ Charles Dickens

GREAT EXPECTATIONS [1867 Edition] by Charles Dickens [Project Gutenberg Editor's Note: There is also another version of this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition] ~ Anonymous

At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you're a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there's not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement. ~ David Nicholls

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated or more articulate... The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an "alienated majesty ~ Mark Edmundson

Will you never understand that I am incorrigible? ~ Charles Dickens

I am not going to guess, at five o'clock in the morning, with my brains frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask me to dinner. ~ Charles Dickens

How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, oh, Father, What have you done with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here? Said louisa as she touched her heart. ~ Charles Dickens

Are there no prisons? ~ Charles Dickens

I will not say that everything was utterly commonplace, becuase I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly commonplace people - and there my vanity steps in ... ~ Charles Dickens

A new heart for a New Year, always! ~ Charles Dickens

Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire. ~ Charles Dickens

Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history. ~ Charles Dickens

"Do not repine, my friends," said Mr. Pecksniff, tenderly. "Do not weep for me. It is chronic." ~ Charles Dickens

Yet he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious air then anywhere else - even with a learned air - as if he considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did. ~ Charles Dickens

Life is made of so many partings welded together ~ Charles Dickens

then p'r'aps we may get into what the 'Merrikins call a fix, and the English a qvestion o' privileges. ~ Charles Dickens

So does a whole world, with all of its greatness and littleness, lie in a twinkling star. ~ Charles Dickens

She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. ~ Charles Dickens

That his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into ~ Charles Dickens

The contest, " said Pott, "shall be prolonged so long as I have health and strength, and that portion of talent with which I am gifted. From that contest, sir, although it may unsettle men's minds and excite their feelings, and render them incapable for the discharge of the every-day duties of ordinary life; from that contest, sir, I will never shrink, till I have set my heel upon the Eatanswill Independent. I wish the people of London, and the people of my country to know, sir, that they may rely upon me; - that I will not desert them, that I am resolved to stand by them, sir, to the last. ~ Charles Dickens

What an unsubstantial, happy, foolish time! Of all the times of mine that Time has in his grip, there is none that in one retrospection I can smile at half so much, and think of half so tenderly. ~ Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it. ~ Stephen Leacock