The Pickwick Papers Quotes

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

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

Hush. Don't ask any questions. It's always best on these occasions to do what the mob do."
"But suppose there are two mobs?" suggested Mr. Snodgrass.
"Shout with the largest," replied Mr. Pickwick.
Volumes could not have said more. ~ Charles Dickens

Mr. Pickwick gazed through his spectacles for an instant on the advancing mass, and then fairly turned his back and
we will not say fled; firstly because it is an ignoble term, and, secondly, because Mr. Pickwick's figure was by no means adapted for that mode of retreat ... ~ Charles Dickens

Poor Mr. Pickwick! ... If he played a wrong card, Miss Bolo looked a small armoury of daggers; if he stopped to consider which was the right one, Lady Snuphanuph would throw herself back in her chair, and smile with a mingled glance of impatience and pity to Mrs. Colonel Wugsby, at which Mrs. Colonel Wugsby would shrug up her shoulders, and cough, as much as to say she wondered whether he ever would begin. ~ Charles Dickens

In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust ... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will ... Each hour is precious. ~ Anton Chekhov

Such,' thought Mr. Pickwick, 'are the narrow views of those philosophers who, content with examining the things that lie before them, look not to the truths which are hidden beyond. ~ Charles Dickens

Then, at the end of every hand, Miss Bolo would inquire with a dismal countenance and reproachful sigh, why Mr. Pickwick had not returned that diamond, or led the club, or roughed the spade, or finessed the heart, or led through the honour, or brought out the ace, or played up to the king, or some such thing; and in reply to all these grave charges, Mr. Pickwick would be wholly unable to plead any justification whatever, having by this time forgotten all about the game. ~ 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

I don't expect Christians to see God as a metaphor, but that's what he is. Perhaps it might be clearer to call him a character in fiction, and a very interesting one too: one of the greatest and most complex villains of all - savage, petty, boastful and jealous, and yet capable of moments of tenderness and extremes of arbitrary affection - for David, for example. But he's not real, any more than Hamlet or Mr Pickwick are real. They are real in the context of their stories, but you won't find them in the phone book. ~ Philip Pullman

Whenever I'm giving talks, I always ask people to think of the most obscure questions because I enjoy those the most. I always get the same questions: Why does Pickwick say "plock" and will there be a movie? I like the really obscure questions because there's so much in the books. There are tons and tons of references and I like when people get the little ones and ask me about them. It's good for the audience [and also] they realize there's more there. ~ Jasper Fforde

Mr. Pickwick took a seat and the paper, but instead of reading the latter, peeped over the top of it, and took a survey of the man of business, who was an elderly, pimply-faced, vegetable-diet sort of man, in a black coat, dark mixture trousers, and small black gaiters; a kind of being who seemed to be an essential part of the desk at which he was writing, and to have as much thought or sentiment. ~ Charles Dickens

Ten minutes," Butch whispered into Marissa's ear. "Can I have ten minutes with you before you go? Please, baby ... "
V rolled his eyes and was relieved to be annoyed at the lovey-dovey routine. At least all the testosterone in him hadn't dried up.
"Baby ... please?"
V took a pull on his mug. "Marissa, throw the sap bastard a bone, would you? The simpering wears on my nerves."
"Well, we can't have that, can we?" Marissa packed up her papers with a laugh and shot Butch a look. "Ten minutes. And you'd better make them count."
Butch was up out of that chair like the thing was on fire. "Don't I always?"
"Mmm ... yes."
As the two locked lips, V snorted. "Have fun, kiddies. Somewhere else. ~ J.R. Ward

Jeez, how stupid was I? What kind of job can a reservation Indian boy get? I was too young to deal blackjack at the casino, there were only about fifteen green grass lawns on the reservation (and none of their owners outsourced the mowing jobs), and the only paper route was owned by a tribal elder named Wally. And he had to deliver only fifty papers, so his job was more like a hobby. ~ Sherman Alexie

And then last, but oh, so utterly
first, came George Eliot. It was in the days
when her cult was at its height - thank heaven
I never left her shrine! - and we used to wait
outside Macmillan's shop to seize the new
instalments of Daniel Deronda. She came
for a few minutes to my room, and I was
almost senseless with excitement. I had just
repapered my room with the newest thing in
dolorous Morris papers. Some one must have
called her attention to it, for I remember that
she said in her shy, impressive way, "Your
paper makes a beautiful background for your
face." The ecstasy was too much, and I
knew no more. ~ Jane Ellen Harrison

A German pilot came out of his plane, drew his legs into a ball, his head down. Papers flew out of his pockets. He did a triple somesault through our formation. No chute. ~ Rick Atkinson

He thought back but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator, thought away. From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books and papers and stories and sorrows: let it sink into the ocean. She had her wallet and her sleeping bag and her running shoes and her van; and she drove as if this were the point from which the rest of her life might begin. ~ Andrea Barrett

Consciousness, there are about 20,000 papers on consciousness with no consensus. Nowhere in history have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little. ~ Michio Kaku

Pope John Paul II himself was kind of a rather independent, creative man. I remember being told by somebody who worked very close with him in preparation for his first visit to the United States in 1979, he studied our normative documents, Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution. And he was amazed. He called his priests first
thing in the morning and he said, he said, I thought America was a pagan country. ~ Chris Matthews

If one read [Lady Whistledown's Society Papers] often enough, one could almost feel a part of London society without actually attending any balls. ~ Julia Quinn

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
leans against the drugstore, smoking,
brushing her hair like a machine ~ Billy Collins

The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly-changing policies, desires, personal wishes, and personal likes and dislikes of two men? What the proprietorship of those papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages. ~ Stanley Baldwin

When I got my head shaved, it was all over the papers. It's weird that when you get a haircut you are in the papers, it's pretty stupid ~ Mark Feehily

As a rule, capitalism is blamed for the undesired effects of a policy directed
at its elimination. The man who sips his morning coffee does not say, "Capitalism has brought this beverage to my breakfast table." But when he reads in the papers that the government of Brazil has ordered part of the coffee crop destroyed, he does not say, "That is government for you"; he exclaims, "That is capitalism for you. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

In my game, you get brokenhearted a bit. You do a play, get a bad review in the papers ... actors are sensitive; you think of all the work you've done, and it breaks your heart, but you learn to shrug it off and to carry on. ~ Phil Daniels

I used to just sign papers and not pay no attention to what I'm signing. ~ Otis Rush

Naturally, Shea was a fan of the old GEICO commercials with their intelligent and maligned cavemen. "There's an element of truth in those," he said. He enjoyed the commercials so much that he wrote a fan letter to the advertising agency that created them, to say, "'Thank you. You just made it so much easier to teach paleoarchaeology.'" Though no one at the company ever responded, GEICO later gave him permission to reproduce a photo of its misunderstood caveman in one of his scientific papers. ~ Marilyn Johnson

I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then. ~ Maya Angelou

And you probably remember all of those papers and documents that they had published in the newspapers. And, you know, when you look at that, it really was their own little jihad that they had going. It just wasn't taken very seriously then. ~ Patty Hearst

soon as I was old enough, I found myself a holiday job as errand boy to earn some money. My first job was probably at the age of 9 or 10, delivering papers before attending school. I remember working for Smith's at the railway station in Bognor. We would arrive about 6:30am, unload the papers from the train when it arrived, take them to the book stall for sorting and each collect our own round in a large newspaper sack. ~ Walter Edney

My father was quite conscious of that distinction, too, and because he spoke very freely in private, he used to sometimes say, quite fiercely, "Now that's secret!" And then if I or somebody else looked hurt because they thought, "Well, of course I'm not going to leave the table and pick up the telephone and ring the papers." If Papa saw that we were wounded, he would say, "It isn't that I don't trust you, but I'm labeling it, I'm labeling it." That phrase passed into family history. "I'm labeling it!" Papa would say, quite merrily sometimes. ~ Mary Soames

The Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was meant to inhibit only the federal government, not the states. The framers, as The Federalist Papers attest (see No. 28), saw the state militias as forces that might be summoned into action against the federal government itself, if it became tyrannical. ~ Joseph Sobran

You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American. ~ Eric Liu

Fuck!" he shouts. "FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!"
"I'm not too fucking fond of loud noises, Bruno. Maybe it'd be a good idea if you backed up to the curb and got your insurance papers ready. We wouldn't want the police to get involved, would we?"
Conversation between Bruno Hanson and George Hanson
In The Shadow of Sadd. ~ Steen Langstrup

Christmas was on a Sunday in 2005, which had a greater than expected negative impact on retail and classified advertising during the last weekend of our fiscal year. In addition, our California papers had held up well in automotive advertising, but the industry-wide decline in this category reached them in the fourth quarter as well. ~ Gary Pruitt

When historian of science Naomi Oreskes surveyed all peer-reviewed papers on climate change published between 1993 and 2003 in the world's leading scientific journal, Science, she found that there were 980 supporting the idea of human-induced global warming and none opposing it. ~ Donald R. Prothero