Quotes from Charles Dickens

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them.

Caleb was no Sorcerer, but in the only magic art that still remains to us: the magic of devoted, deathless love:

The magic reel, which, rolling on before has led the chronicler thus far, now slackens its pace, and stops. It lies before the goal; the pursuit is at anend.

Here he shook hands with me; not in the common way, but standing at a good distance from me, and lifting my hand up and down like a pump handle, that he was a little afraid of.

chafed the hands that held his arm. "There, there, there! See

It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it.

Indeed!" said Defarge, with much indifference. "Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic, had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am informed

Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence. Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone and bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried to find out what nature and accident really had made me, and to be that, and nothing else.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for myself.

Ámala, ámala, ámala! Si te complace, ámala. Si te hiere, ámala. Aunque te rompa el corazón, y a medida que envejezca y se endurezca se te desgarrará más, ¡ámala, ámala, ámala!

I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she, quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine.

Here on the head of an empty barrel stood on end were an ink-bottle, some old stumps of pens, and some dirty playbills; and against the wall were pasted several large printed alphabets in several plain hands. "What are you doing here?" asked my guardian. "Trying to learn myself to read and write," said Krook.

You!' said the old man contemptuously. 'What do you know of the time when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read and read, hour after hour, and night after night, till their reason wandered beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were exhausted; till morning's light brought no freshness or health to them; and they sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies to their dry old books?

How weak am I, that I could shed tears at this reception! I who have never experienced anything else; who have never expected anything else.

The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham's. 'Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip,' said my guardian, comfortably satisfied beforehand on the general head, 'because the man who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man.

King Richard, who was a strong, restless, burly man, with one idea always in his head, and that the very troublesome idea of breaking the heads of other men, was mightily impatient to go on a Crusade to the Holy Land, with a great army.

Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?

In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It may have been characteristic of Mr. Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind* who has been working "mostly underground" all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit—but poor little fellow!

Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness; the old year was preparing, like an ancient philosopher, to call his friends around him, and amidst the sound of feasting and revelry to pass gently and calmly away.

You are a little low this evening, Frederick,' said the Father of the Marshalsea. 'Anything the matter?

I saw light wreaths from Joe's pipe floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe,—not obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared together.

None of us clearly know to whom or to what we are indebted in this wise, until some marked stop in the whirling wheel of life brings the right perception with it. It comes with sickness, it comes with sorrow, it comes with the loss of the dearly loved, it is one of the most frequent uses of adversity.