Interesting Characters Quotes

"Oh, what a misfortune is mine," cried Bradley, breaking off to wipe the starting perspiration from his face as he shook from head to foot, "that I cannot so control myself as to appear a stronger creature than this, when a man who has not felt in all his life what I have felt in a day can so command himself!" He said it in a very agony, and even followed it with an errant motion of his hands as if he could have torn himself. ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens Fledgeby deserved Mr. Alfred Lammle's eulogium. He was the meanest cur existing, with a single pair of legs. And instinct (a word we all clearly understand) going largely on four legs, and reason always on two, meanness on four legs never attains the perfection of meanness on two. ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything" ~ Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens "I know quite enough of myself," said Bella, with a charming air of being inclined to give herself up as a bad job, "and I don't improve upon acquaintance." ~ 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 'Tis misfortune that awakens ingenuity, or fortitude, or endurance, in hearts where these qualities had never come to life but for the circumstance which gave them a being. ~ The History of Henry Esmond by William Makepeace Thackeray A long series of sterile weeks lay behind us, and here at last there was a fitting object for those remarkable powers which, like all special gifts, become irksome to their owner when they are not in use. ~ The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. ~ Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis "Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul--and that's resignation." ~ Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad "Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women." ~ Washington Square by Henry James