Dickens Quotes - Page 5

• 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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• 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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• It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

  John Ratzenberger

  Cheer, Real, Book

  Source: www.gq.com

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• I read an awful lot in college - a lot of Dickens, a lot of 19th century American stuff, a lot of old mysteries. Maybe it's helped me attain a certain fluidity with my style.

  Josh Lieb

  College, Style, Fluidity

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.

  Cressida Cowell

  Children, Book, Reading

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• All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.

  Stephen Leacock

  Tragedy, World, Humour

  Stephen Leacock (2010). “My Remarkable Uncle”, p.114, New Canadian Library

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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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• Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

  Charles Dickens

  Writing, Support, Events

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• I promise to charm the dickens out of him,' said Will, sitting up and readjusting his crushed hat. 'I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name.' 'The man's eighty-nine', muttered Jem. 'He may well have the problem anyway.

  Cassandra Clare

  Lying, Men, Names

  Cassandra Clare (2013). “Clockwork Prince”, p.85, Simon and Schuster

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• I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another.

  Gary Paulsen

  War, Book, Reading

  "Author Interview: Gary Paulsen". Interview with Amanda Lynch, www.thechildrensbookreview.com. January 26, 2009.

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• Writing a novel- actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs- is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

  Steve Hely

  Pain, Taken, Writing

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• I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.

  Arthur Bradford

  Writing, Adults, London

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Home, Ignorance, Novelists

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Childhood is not dead. Children were worse off when we were hunter-gatherers; they were threatened in medieval times and exploited during the Industrial Revolution. Was it any better in the time of Charles Kingsley or Charles Dickens?

  Robert Winston

  Children, Childhood, Hunters

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• Great Expectations [book by Charles Dickens] has been described as "Dickens's harshest indictment of society." Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.

  Felix Dennis

  Expectations, Fever, Too Much

  "Felix Dennis's top 10 anti-poverty books" by Felix Dennis, www.theguardian.com. September 3, 2006.

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• I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.

  Rich Sommer

  Jobs, New York, Character

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• She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

  Ian Mcewan

  Reading, Book, Home

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• All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Sublime, Austen

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• My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Reading, Aunt, Said

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• I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

  Harold Bloom

  Kings, Reading, Sadness

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• 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

  Son, Scrooge, Saws

  Stephen King (2010). “The Green Mile: The Complete Serial Novel”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.

  Melina Marchetta

  Writing, Character, Self

  Melina Marchetta (2010). “Jellicoe Road”, p.8, Harper Collins

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• I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the must absurd beauty.

  David Benioff

  Men, Greatest Fear, People

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• The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

  David Nicholls

  Facts, Yeats, Wilde

  David Nicholls (2004). “A Question of Attraction: A Novel”, p.233, Villard

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• Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Heart, Echoes

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