Quotes from Charles Dickens

I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed,

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.

Worldly goods are divided unequally, and man must not repine.

This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden; very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all blows and buffets now, with just the same air as he had taken mine then. It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest necessaries, for everything that I remarked upon turned out to have been sent in on my account from the coffee-house or somewhere else.

This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said. "There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!

He couldn't finish the name. The final letter swelled in his throat, to the size of the whole alphabet.

Have I ever sought release?" "In words. No. Never.

Unico spiraglio di luce in tanta tristezza erano i miei libri; fui fedele a loro com'essi eran rimasti fedeli a me e li rilessi da cima a fondo non so quante volte.

You didn't take your wife p. 59for fast and for loose; but for better for worse.

Time is no object here. We never know what o'clock it is, and we never care.

...certain it is that minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort...

The town was glad with morning light; places that had shown ugly and distrustful all night long, now wore a smile; and sparkling sunbeams dancing on chamber windows, and twinkling through blind and curtain before sleepers' eyes, shed light even into dreams, and chased away the shadows of the night.

Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it's blowing up; and then they lengthens it out.

These were, in general, ancient inhabitants of that region; born, and bred there from boyhood; who had long since become wheezy and asthmatical, and short of breath, except in the article of story-telling; in which respect they were still marvellously long-winded.

It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something.

The weather being fine and dry... he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out to walk.... in the healthful exercise and the pleasant road. It is not easy to walk alone in the country without musing upon something. And he had plenty of unsettled subjects to meditate upon, though he had been walking to the Land's End.

Mr. Tacker, who from his great experience in the performance of funerals, would have made an excellent pantomime actor, winked at Mrs. Gamp without at all disturbing the gravity of his countenance...

...winking all the way as a vent for his superfluous sagacity...

He was a little high-dried man, with a dark squeezed-up face, and small restless black eyes, that kept winking and twinkling on each side of his little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing a perpetual game of bo-peep with that feature.

Here he went through the not very difficult process of winking upon the company with his solitary eye...

Oh the brain, the brain!... Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called Man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are!

Shall we speak of the inspiration of a poet or a priest, and not of the heart impelled by love and self-devotion to the lowliest work in the lowliest way of life?

"Spring is the time of the year, when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade."

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.