Dickens Quotes - Page 4

• Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city’s skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.

  Jan Morris

  Essence, Skills, Cities

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• Some, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens's A Christmas Carol, have a hard time loving anyone, even themselves, because of their selfishness. Love seeks to give rather than to get. Charity towards and compassion for others is a way to overcome too much self-love

  James E. Faust

  Compassion, Hard Times, Self

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• Few literary depictions of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake match the intensity and visceral power of those in Flacco's gripping first novel. The author's screenwriting talent shines in this story of the earth's destructive power and humanity's moral depravity. The emerging maniacal personality, revealed in increasingly gruesome and venomous detail, rivals the Ripper.Dickens meets Hannibal Lecter. Brace yourself.

  William Bernhardt

  Earthquakes, San Francisco, Personality

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• William Shakespeare was the most remarkable storyteller that the world has ever known. Homer told of adventure and men at war, Sophocles and Tolstoy told of tragedies and of people in trouble. Terence and Mark Twain told cosmic stories, Dickens told melodramatic ones, Plutarch told histories and Hans Christian Andersen told fairy tales. But Shakespeare told every kind of story – comedy, tragedy, history, melodrama, adventure, love stories and fairy tales – and each of them so well that they have become immortal. In all the world of storytelling he has become the greatest name.

  Marchette Chute

  Christian, War, Adventure

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• I doubt if Dickens did, especially his women-his pretty women-Mrs. Dombey, Florence, Dora, Agnes, Ruth Pinch, Kate Nickleby, little Emily-we know them all through Hablot Browne alone-and none of them present any very marked physical characteristics. They are sweet and graceful, neither tall nor short; they have a pretty droop in their shoulders, and are very ladylike; sometimes they wear ringlets, sometimes not, and each would do very easily for the other.

  George du Maurier

  Sweet, Pretty Woman, Doubt

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• If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.

  Dustin Hoffman

  Husband, Nice, Caring

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• I would happily storm hell in the company of these troops ... how strongly they have demonstrated to the world that free men and women can fight like the dickens.

  James Mattis

  Inspirational, Courage, War

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• Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.

  Samuel Fuller

  People, Twists, Medical

  "Fictional character: Cathy". "Shock Corridor", www.imdb.com. 1963.

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• From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

  Christopher Moore

  Hip Hop, Dialect, Way

  "OMFG, Horatio!" by Christopher Moore, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 23, 2010.

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• I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

  Stephen Dobyns

  Writing, School, College

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Things I Love, Narrators, Novelists

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• Something that comes to us, some gym shoe that comes to us as a result of child labor from a brutal dictatorship, where people do not have basic freedoms, it wouldn't bug me to tax the living Dickens out of that thing or even to forbid its importation whatsoever. But that's a moral question, not an economic question.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Children, Shoes, People

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• I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that's how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.

  Lynne Rae Perkins

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

  Whit Stillman

  Thinking, Austin, Endure

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.

  Frederick Busch

  Kings, Reviews, Spite

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• I had a very sparse comic upbringing - not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Reading, Holiday, Kids

  "Benedict Cumberbatch Explains How He Was Enticed Into "Doctor Strange". Interview with Peter Sciretta, www.slashfilm.com. September 27, 2016.

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• It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

  Robert Hass

  Rivers, Black, Maps

  "Robert Hass" by Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

  Frederick Busch

  Beautiful, Sitting Still, Worry

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.

  N. Katherine Hayles

  Long, Boredom, Focus

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• The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

  Claire Tomalin

  Self, Alive, Young

  "Claire Tomalin: 'Writing induces melancholy. You're alone, a hermit'". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. September 24, 2011.

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• As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.

  Claire Tomalin

  Tired, Successful, Years

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• I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.

  John Baldessari

  Window, Felt

  Interview with David Salle, www.interviewmagazine.com. October 09, 2013.

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• You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Pain, Thinking, People

  "Doom and glory of knowing who you are". Jane Howard, Life Magazine, Volume 54, No. 21 (p. 89), May 24, 1963.

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• I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Men, Promise, London

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1967). “The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Volume I-II: 1814-1843”, p.468, Harvard University Press

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• But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sex, Character, Rights

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.245, OUP Oxford

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