Dickens Quotes - Page 4

• I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

  Jane Birkin

  Taken, World, Misery

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• It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.

  Ally Carter

  Real, Believe, Book

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• What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

  Peter Carey

  Thinking, Done, Littles

  "Peter Carey: making it up as he goes along" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. March 16, 2012.

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• Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

  Simon Callow

  Heart, Men, Injustice

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• I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.

  Michelle Dockery

  Character, Thinking, Stories

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Grief, Believe, Reading

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• My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

  Debbie Macomber

  Children, Wall, Names

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• In A Midnight Carol Patricia Davis illuminates the dark and brilliant humanity of Charles Dickens -- the man who lived a rags-to-riches life more remarkable than any of his stories.

  Richard Lederer

  Dark, Men, Humanity

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• Jimmy Dickens was the essence of country music and the heart of the Grand Ole Opry.

  Connie Smith

  Country, Heart, Essence

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• I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.

  Amor Towles

  Blue, Missing, Finishing

  Amor Towles (2011). “Rules of Civility”, p.98, Hachette UK

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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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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