Quotes About Dickens

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

Here he went through the not very difficult process of winking upon the company with his solitary eye...

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.

Steve Zahn and I like to go to dinner, and we love to go to Chef Donald Link's Herb Saint.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.

We Woosters freeze like the dickens when we seek sympathy and meet with cold reserve. Nothing further Jeeves, I said with quiet dignity.

Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.

Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.

To Dickens, true charity was a matter of openhearted benevolence; to use the relief of poverty as a cudgel to beat a recipient into piousness was repellent and evil.

Society." John Forster, who would one day become Dickens's great friend, adviser, editor, and first biographer, wrote in the Examiner that Dickens had excelled particularly in his portraits of the ludicrous and the pathetic, all rendered in an "agreeable, racy style.

Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word 'Dickensian' could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.

With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.

Invite him to poetry club, Doff said with a smirk. See if he asks you to take a look at his Emily Dickinson. Beatrice snorted. How long did it take you to think that up? Most of lunch, and the rest of G block, Doff said, shrugging modestly. I started with 'read his Charles Dickens,' but Charles Dickens is a novelist. What about his Philip K. Dick? Who's that? asked Doff. He wrote the book that got turned into Blade Runner .

And we recall in Dickens' fiction how universal it is that a child looks after an adult, and how the adult remains so dependent upon the child that he becomes something worse than child-like.

It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.

it has been observed that Londoners became more extravagant in the presence of Charles Dickens, so that they might appear more Dickensian, so

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

You cannot read Dickens without putting in a little more effort. You cannot eat a ripe pawpaw without its innards and juice spilling down your chin. Likewise, the language of Dickens makes your mouth do strange things, and when you're not used to his words your jaw will creak.

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.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

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.

The bar was, in fact, a library. A place Dickens would have been comfortable in. Where Conan Doyle might have found a useful volume. Where Jane Austen could sit and read. And get drunk, if she wanted.