Charles Dickens Quotes

“A day wasted on others is not wasted on one's self.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
― Charles Dickens

“Please, sir, I want some more.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

(John 11:25-26)”
― Anonymous, The Holy Bible: King James Version

“I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman.”
― Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

“So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!...”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.”
― Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Good for Christmas-time is the ruddy colour of the cloak in which--the tree making a forest of itself for her to trip through, with her basket--Little Red Riding-Hood comes to me one Christmas Eve to give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling Wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite, and then ate her, after making that ferocious joke about his teeth. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be; and there was nothing for it but to look out the Wolf in the Noah's Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table, as a monster who was to be degraded.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Tree

“The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with red upon it that the sun had never give, and would never take away.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge, long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making explanation for itself and wearing it out. ”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“History teaches us that Literary Book Awards have always been the quickest and easiest way to achieve global fame. They have helped countless authors to shoot to stardom. But this fame usually fades away after their death, unlike William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens who never won any awards, yet they continue to be read, quoted and remembered as the greatest writers of all time.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.”
― Stephen King, The Green Mile

“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“Meat, ma'am, meat.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he was having in writing this Drood book for serialisation, this upstart of a girl had the temerity to ask, 'But suppose you died before all the book was written?' [...] He spoke very softly in his kindest voice and said to her, 'One can only work on, you know--work while it is day.”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.”
― Charles Dickens, The Haunted House

“Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

“Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.”
― Conor Cruise O'Brien

“I know how hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself; but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to destroy life in you?”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“...been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life.”
― Charles Dickens, A Chistmas Carol

“It is required of every man... that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death... It is doomed to wander through the world... and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”
― n.a

“Charles Dickens wrote prose with the energy of a boanerges struggling to make his audience comfortable with the truth of the word. One of the greatest writers of all time, Dickens left us a uniquely pleasant language that continues to locate its path on the thickets of rich and far-reaching reading culture.”
― Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu