Charles Dickens quotes - page 14

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. (Charles Dickens)
Affery, like greater people, had always been right in her facts, and always wrong in the theories she deduced from them. View quote
Charles Dickens
. . . it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself. View quote
Charles Dickens
The jovial party broke up next morning. Breakings-up are capital things in our school-days, but in after life they are painful enough. Death, self-interest, and fortune's changes, are every day breaking up many a happy group, and scattering them far and wide and the boys and girls never come back again. View quote
Charles Dickens
For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering through those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and bygone times, and hovering, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old. View quote
Charles Dickens
Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever, he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows. View quote
Charles Dickens
There is something indefinably keen and wan about her anatomy, and she has a watchful way of looking out of the corners of her eyes without turning her head which could be pleasantly dispensed with, especially when she is in an ill humour and near knives. Through all the good taste of her dress and little adornments, these objections so express themselves that she seems to go about like a very neat she-wolf imperfectly tamed. View quote
Charles Dickens
He had a certain air of being a handsome man--which he was not and a certain air of being a well-bred man--which he was not. It was mere swagger and challenge but in this particular, as in many others, blustering assertion goes for proof, half over the world. View quote
Charles Dickens
He had a sense of his dignity, which was of the most exquisite nature. He could detect a design upon it when nobody else had any perception of the fact. His life was made an agony by the number of fine scalpels that he felt to be incessantly engaged in dissecting his dignity. View quote
Charles Dickens
Marley was dead: to begin with. View quote
Charles Dickens
You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay. (Charles Dickens)
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. View quote
Charles Dickens
Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it - as at last I did, thank Heaven! - and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to dawn. View quote
Charles Dickens
It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets. View quote
Charles Dickens
She dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it. She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her Ode to an Expiring Frog,' sir. View quote
Charles Dickens
It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella. View quote
Charles Dickens
The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he looked like death; not death as it shews in shroud and coffin, but in the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven: and the gross air of the world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed. View quote
Charles Dickens
The doctor seemed especially troubled by the fact of the robbery having been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact business at noon, and to make an appointment, by the twopenny post, a day or two previous. View quote
Charles Dickens
My heart is set, as firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman. I have no thought, no view, no hope, in life beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to the wind. View quote
Charles Dickens
The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance. View quote
Charles Dickens
Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. (Charles Dickens)
Christmas is a poor excuse every 25th of December to pick a man's pockets. View quote
Charles Dickens
I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age. View quote
Charles Dickens
Take a little time - count five-and-twenty, Tattycoram. View quote
Charles Dickens
My life is one demd horrid grind. View quote
Charles Dickens