Charles Dickens Quotes

"No one is useless in this world," retorted the Secretary, "who lightens the burden of it for any one else." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "Why am I always at war with myself? Why have I told, as if upon compulsion, what I knew all along I ought to have withheld? Why am I making a friend of this woman beside me, in spite of the whispers against her that I hear in my heart?" ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "Next," said Mrs Wilfer with a wave of her gloves, expressive of abdication under protest from the culinary throne, "I would recommend examination of the bacon in the saucepan on the fire, and also of the potatoes by the application of a fork. Preparation of the greens will further become necessary if you persist in this unseemly demeanour." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die. ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?" ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "No man knows till the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea," striking himself upon the breast, "has been heaved up ever since." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "I cannot help it; reason has nothing to do with it; I love her against reason--but who would as soon love me for my own sake, as she would love the beggar at the corner." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "It is a sensation not experienced by many mortals," said he, "to be looking into a churchyard on a wild windy night, and to feel that I no more hold a place among the living than these dead do, and even to know that I lie buried somewhere else, as they lie buried here. Nothing uses me to it. A spirit that was once a man could hardly feel stranger or lonelier, going unrecognized among mankind, than I feel." ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell. ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens