Pickwick Papers Quotes

It only shows how true the old saying is, that a man never knows what he can do till he tries, gentlemen. From "Pickwick Papers" ch. 49 page 646 ~ Charles Dickens

Job Trotter bowed low; and in spite of Mr. Weller's previous remonstrance, the tears again rose to his eyes. 'I never see such a feller,' said Sam. 'Blessed if I don't think he's got a main in his head as is always turned on. ~ Charles Dickens

Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes - eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on - beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling - though no two people ever agreed on their colour - were they grey, green, blue, brown? - those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted. ~ Simon Callow

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. ~ Roberto Bolano

Annant is Pickwick paperless, the hunter of wisdom and due to Lovelace heart, a budding poet-ass. ~ Aporva Kala

I've been sifting through the layers
of dusty books and faded papers.
They tell a story I used to know;
one that happened so long ago. ~ Kate Wolf

I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice. The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention. ~ Jenny Offill

I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills. ~ Sharon Creech

You read the papers and you watch television, so you know the kind of spider-brained, commercially poisoned piece-of-crap reporting you get in America. ~ Greg Palast

Somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. ~ Harper Lee

We have all read tragic stories in our local papers about gun accidents as a result of misuse. As lawmakers we can better promote safety and responsibility by encouraging gun owners to purchase gun safes to store firearms and keep them from falling into the wrong hands. ~ Ron Lewis

By the by," Stephen said, "what is the difference between a viscount and a stallion?"
Miss Marshall shook her head. "What is it?"
Stephen gave her a broad smile. "The first is a horse's arse. The second is an entire horse."
She buried her head in her hands. "No. You cannot distract me with terrible jokes. You are supposed to be looking up facts. Shoo!"
But Stephen didn't stop. "What's the difference between a marquess and a paperweight?"
"I'm sure you'll tell me."
"One of them can't do anything unless a servant helps it along. The other one holds down papers. ~ Courtney Milan

In his Greenwich Village apartment, Jose
Garcia Villa fords his fiords of books and papers
on his way to the bar of the anchored angel.
In a boxcar to Bakersfield
stars beam on Carlos Bulosan
papaya blossoms of Mangusmana. ~ Ricardo M. De Ungria

The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; and notwithstanding the efforts of the papers to disseminate early discontents, I expect that a just, dispassionate and steady conduct, will at length rally to a proper system the great body of our country. Unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner, we shall be able I hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom & harmony. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Wayne: You wanna know why I really came to find you?
Waxilliam: Why?
Wayne: I thought of you happy in a comfy bed, resting and relaxing, spending the rest of your life sipping tea and reading papers while people bring you food and maids rub your toes and stuff.
Waxilliam: And?
Wayne: And I just couldn't leave you to a fate like that ... I'm too good a friend to let a mate of mine die in such a terrible situation.
Waxilliam: Comfortable?
Wayne: No. Boring. ~ Brandon Sanderson

The business being thus closed ... dined together and took a cordial leave of each other After which I returned to my lodgings, did some business with and received the papers from the secretary of the Convention, and retired to meditate on the momentous work which had been executed. ~ George Washington

A scientist who writes for a grant has to write subpar papers - so that the grant giver will understand what the paper is about. ~ Janusz Korwin-Mikke

the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

It is beyond us to divine how any people could have bred cobs of corn from such a thin and unpropitious plant - or even thought to try. Hoping to settle the matter once and for all, food scientists from around the world convened in 1969 at a conference on the origin of corn at the University of Illinois, but the debates grew so vituperative and bitter, and at times so personal, that the conference broke up in confusion and no papers from it were ever published. ~ Bill Bryson

I was studying American politicians who were searching - allegedly - for American communists because it would put them on the front pages of the papers in their home towns. ~ Robert Vaughn

I am an interpreter of interpretations ~ James Delingpole

Michael, don't you know by now that my grandmother and Uncle Alfred are the largest private shareholders of Singapore Press Holdings? We're not going to be in the papers. We're never going to be in the papers. ~ Kevin Kwan

Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that." Professor ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo's sincerely godless generation, the question hasn't come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There's no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there's nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war - these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds. ~ Ian McEwan

Now, just to understand better what's going on, let's imagine the shoe on the other foot. Let's imagine that hundreds of thousands of badly-educated Americans, white Americans, were pouring across the boarder into Mexico. And let's imagine that they were insisting on instruction in school in English rather than Spanish. Let's imagine they were asking for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, they were celebrating Fourth of July rather than Sinco de Mayo, buying up newspapers, publishing in English, television stations, radios, all publishing and broadcasting in English ,and that there were so many of them coming in that they threatened to reduce Mexicans to minority. Do you think the Mexicans could possibly be tricked into thinking that this was enrichment, this was diversity, that this was great? No. No. They wouldn't stand for it for a moment. This would be to them an impossible unacceptable invasion of their country. And you would find the same reaction in any non-white country anywhere in the world. Can you imagine say, the Japanese or the Nigerians, the Pakistanis, the Costa Ricans accepting this kind of wholesale demographic change that would change their country, transform their country, and reduce them to a minority? No. These things are impossible to imagine. ~ Jared Taylor

The people who hitched to Katmandu (and are doubtlessly still doing so, despite the usual reports of official prohibitions) seem to me to be of this sort, displaced persons, aimless couples without papers. They are ill-suited to play the role which they are conventionally given; that of proletarian playboys, outriders of a modern sub-culture, who intend, mainly through will-power, to end injustice and rule the world. For the most part they have chosen to be the sole inhabitants of private worlds, and their aspirations will not be found in the bazaars of the international youth movement, or of the global underground or any other such tentative organizations. ~ Patrick Marnham

Ladies and Gentlemen. I should like to inform you on behalf of the nation state of Guyana, that we are going to resign from being a country. We can't make it work. We have tried. We have done our best. It is not possible. The problems are insoluble. From midnight tonight, we shall cease trading. The country is now disbanded. We will voluntarily liquidate ourselves. The nation will disperse quietly, a little shamefaced but so what. We had a go.

Different people have suggested different solutions. Do it this way. Try that. Let me have a go. Nothing works. We are at the mercy of the rich countries. A team of management consultants from the United States could not find the answer, and for not finding the answer, we had to pay them an amount that substantially increased our national debt. We give in, gracefully, but we give in."

And then he imagined himself, quietly and with dignity, putting his papers in his briefcase, bowing to the hushed assembly, returning to clear out his office and going for a walk with his wife along the sea wall. (The Ventriloquist's Tale ~ Pauline Melville

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material, and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. ~ Daniel Ellsberg

But I hear Beauchamp in the next room; you can dispute together, and that will pass away the time."
"About what?"
"About the papers."
"My dear friend," said Lucien with an air of sovereign contempt, "do I ever read the papers?"
"Then you will dispute the more."
"M. Beauchamp," announced the servant.
"Come in, come in," said Albert, rising and advancing to meet the young man.
"Here is Debray, who detests you without reading you, so he says."
"He is quite right," returned Beauchamp; "for I criticise him without knowing what he does. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Even when the divorce papers had come in the mail, even when he'd finally signed them, he'd still felt married, still felt as if he had to be faithful to those vows even though they were empty and meaningless now. Perhaps that was just because he was afraid of moving past those vows, afraid of starting over. So now he looked straight into the eyes of that fear. The fear of being hurt again. The fear of not being worthy of a woman's love. The fear of failure. ~ Ann H. Gabhart

I leave her to chemically combust and find Wren in the student council office, filling out extremely interesting paperwork. He's buried behind piles of the stuff. I can barely see tufts of his blonde hair poking out. I reach into the paperwork pile and shove the two halves aside. Hundreds of them fall off the desk and to the floor. Papers drift through the air like snowflakes. Fat, boring-ass snowflakes. Wren looks up, face slack with shock.
"Whatcha doing?" I ask.
"Dividing up funding for the other clubs," He whispers, clearly distraught. A paper plops onto his head and slides off dejectedly. I'm respectful for three seconds.
"So anyway, I had this nightmare in which Jack was sexy and Kayla died. ~ Sara Wolf

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one, this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the night. ~ Charles Stross

MOMA's values were blown through the American education system, from high school upwards-and downwards, too, greatly raising the status of "creativity" and "self-expression" in kindergarten. By the 1970s, the historical study of modern art had expanded to the point where students were scratching for unexploited thesis subjects. By the mid-eighties, twenty-one-year-old art-history majors would be writing papers on the twenty-six-year-old graffitists. ~ Robert Hughes

You know well that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the [government] ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If you don't want my services, then it's only fair you cut me loose so I can make another girl or two happy this summer. Or three." He shifts my papers into a neater pile.
"What will they do once I take you off the market?" I ask. "I can only imagine the poor girls wandering around like a lost herd of sheep all summer, wondering where you went." I risk another glance at the staring girls and shudder. "Do they even blink? Baa. Baa. Baa. ~ Anne Eliot

When you're under audit, you don't give your papers. An audit is - I have been under audit for so many years. Every year, I get audited. For, I think, over 10 years, maybe even 12 years, I have been audited. And I think it's very fair. And I think I'm being singled out. ~ Donald Trump

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'. ~ David Icke

In city rooms and in the bars where newspeople drink, you can find out what's going on. You can't find it in the papers. ~ Molly Ivins

When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order. ~ Chris Cleave

Yeah. I mean, it just seemed to me that it was - I felt so helpless to this business of not having any papers. That seems like a throwback to a schoolboy. ~ James Stockdale

After the paper rush subsided, the older boys sometimes struck deals with the younger newsies to buy their leftover papers. 'One of the big guys would say to one of the little guys, 'Hey, punk, want to buy me out tonight?' said Philip Marcus. 'An' the little guy said yes. It was his ass if he didn't. ~ Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day. ~ Stuart Dybek

He might trail off in the direction of a shiny new thought and end up like the man in Penn Station, content to wander the corridors of the world with bags of papers to keep him company. At ~ Kimberly Rae Miller

For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution. And ~ Alexander Hamilton

Most of the time our events aren't in the papers and they're not televised, so people don't know when we're competing. ~ Sanya Richards-Ross

is a fact known to almost everyone familiar with the Anarchist movement that a great number of acts, for which Anarchists had to suffer, either originated with the capitalist press or were instigated, if not directly perpetrated, by the police. For a number of years acts of violence had been committed in Spain, for which the Anarchists were held responsible, hounded like wild beasts, and thrown into prison. Later it was disclosed that the perpetrators of these acts were not Anarchists, but members of the police department. The scandal became so widespread that the conservative Spanish papers demanded the apprehension and punishment of the gang-leader, Juan Rull, who was subsequently condemned to death and executed. The sensational evidence, brought to light during the trial, forced Police Inspector Momento to exonerate completely the Anarchists from any connection with the acts committed during a long period. ~ Emma Goldman

Sometimes I wouldn't give an interview because I didn't have the time or something else was more important. So they come up with a story which I don't think is always true, but they have to sell papers. ~ Martina Hingis