Dickens Quotes

• Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

  Michael Caine

  Inspiring, Encouragement, Bad Day

  114 Copy quote

• Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Teacher, Mark, Dearest Friend

  Lloyd Alexander (2006). “The Foundling: And Other Tales of Prydain”, p.97, Macmillan

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• I called my mom, and I was so excited. I was telling her, 'I'm going to be on the Grand Ole Opry! This is crazy!' And she told me, 'Watch out for Jimmy Dickens, because he likes the pretty girls.

  Carrie Underwood

  Girl, Mom, Crazy

  3 Copy quote

• As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

  Garrison Keillor

  Book, Past, Years

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• I think [Charles] Dickens was an extrovert and Nelly [Ternan] an introvert, and I think that Nelly saw beyond the fame and adulation and she actually loved Dickens essentially for who he was. So I think he felt like she was someone he could be himself with.

  Felicity Jones

  Thinking, Extroverts, Saws

  Source: www.shockya.com

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• [President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.

  Anna Quindlen

  Country, Political Will, Enemy

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• Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

  Stephen Leacock

  Light, Race, World

  Stephen Leacock (2012). “Feast of Stephen”, p.111, McClelland & Stewart

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• I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

  George Brandis

  Reading, Thinking, Cities

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.

  George Brandis

  Hate, Style, Wanted

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

  Eudora Welty

  Mother, Reading, Information

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• Little Jimmy Dickens has long been a musical hero of mine and one of the finest entertainers to ever step on any stage. I was deeply honored to call him a friend and will always remember the time I got to spend with him. The music world has lost one of our greatest treasures. Rest in peace, my little friend. You were loved by so many of us!

  Charlie Daniels

  Rest In Peace, Hero, Greatest Treasure

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• As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.

  Harry Lloyd

  Children, Mirrors, Acting

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• Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

  Lance Morrow

  Reading, Government, Years

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• Who knows but we may count among our intellectual chickens
  Like them an Earl of Thackeray and p'raps a Duke of
  Dickens

  W. S. Gilbert

  Rap, Intellectual, May

  William Schwenck Gilbert, “AngLICIsed Utopia”

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• I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.

  William P. Young

  Journey, Thinking, Creative

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• In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.

  Gilbert Seldes

  Art, Patriotic, Men

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• Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

  A. S. Byatt

  Running, Reality, Looks

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• Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

  Jane Smiley

  Avid, Names, Poetry

  Jane Smiley (2008). “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel”, p.97, Anchor

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• The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues - probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life - even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

  Robert Gottlieb

  Kindness, Hard Work, Men

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• I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story.

  John Boyne

  Running, Growing Up, Children

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

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• Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.

  Jim Carrey

  Writing, Years, Hundred

  Source: movieweb.com

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• I'm not saying that people have to listen to rock music. It's a great, cool thing and it can really be liberating for a lot of people but, hey, so can Charles Dickens so I'm not going to judge.

  Black Francis

  Rocks, People, Judging

  "Pixies Interview". Interview with Chris Carle, www.ign.com. July 6, 2009.

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• As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Character, Eye

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.3106, Delphi Classics

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• The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cutting, Men, Voice

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• History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That's why people should read Shakespeare and Dickens as well as history ~~ they will find the best, the worst, the height of noble attainment and the depths of depravity.

  David McCullough

  Betrayal, Book, Reading

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