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Charles Dickens

" LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln‚Äôs Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes ‚Äî gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another‚Äôs umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‚Äôprentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time ‚Äî as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln‚Äôs Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery. "

Charles Dickens

Autumn

related quotes

" The most important thing in life is to stop saying 'I wish' and start saying 'I will.' Consider nothing impossible, then treat possiblities as probabilities. "

Charles Dickens

Inspirational

" Our opportunities to give of ourselves are indeed limitless, but they are also perishable. There are hearts to gladden. There are kind words to say. There are gifts to be given. There are deeds to be done. There are souls to be saved.As we remember that ‚Äúwhen ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God,‚Äù (Mosiah 2:17) we will not find ourselves in the unenviable position of Jacob Marley‚Äôs ghost, who spoke to Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens‚Äôs immortal "Christmas Carol." Marley spoke sadly of opportunities lost. Said he: 'Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life‚Äôs opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!'Marley added: 'Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!'Fortunately, as we know, Ebenezer Scrooge changed his life for the better. I love his line, 'I am not the man I was.'Why is Dickens‚Äô "Christmas Carol" so popular? Why is it ever new? I personally feel it is inspired of God. It brings out the best within human nature. It gives hope. It motivates change. We can turn from the paths which would lead us down and, with a song in our hearts, follow a star and walk toward the light. We can quicken our step, bolster our courage, and bask in the sunlight of truth. We can hear more clearly the laughter of little children. We can dry the tear of the weeping. We can comfort the dying by sharing the promise of eternal life. If we lift one weary hand which hangs down, if we bring peace to one struggling soul, if we give as did the Master, we can‚Äîby showing the way‚Äîbecome a guiding star for some lost mariner. "

Charles Dickens

Inspirational

" And a beautiful world we live in, when it is possible, and when many other such things are possible, and not only possible, but done-- done, see you!-- under that sky there, every day. "

Charles Dickens

Dark , Angry

" There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. "

Charles Dickens

Humor , Laughter

" Mr Lorry asks the witness questions:Ever been kicked? Might have been.Frequently? No. Ever kicked down stairs? Decidedly not; once received a kick at the top of a staircase, and fell down stairs of his own accord. "

Charles Dickens

courtroom , dickens

" Never say never "

Charles Dickens

Philosophy , Inspirational

" I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me. "

Charles Dickens

Depression , alone

" The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I‚Äôll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction‚Äîuntil he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define ‚Äúliterature‚Äù. The Latin root simply means ‚Äúletters‚Äù. Those letters are either delivered‚Äîthey connect with an audience‚Äîor they don‚Äôt. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that‚Äôs because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books‚Äîand thus what they count as literature‚Äîreally tells you more about them than it does about the book. "

Charles Dickens

Literature , Reading

" Some conjurers say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither my friend, neither. It's number one. (Fagin) "

Charles Dickens

Truth

" [She wasn't] a logically reasoning woman, but God is good, and hearts may count in heaven as high as heads. "

Charles Dickens

God

" There is a wisdom of the head, and... there is a wisdom of the heart. "

Charles Dickens

Wisdom

" Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. "

Charles Dickens

Wisdom , Life

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