A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up...

I like Mr. Dickens’ books much better than yours, Papa. Said one of Thackeray’s daughters.

To do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and you may take any means which the end to be attained will justify.

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the...

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

I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people. And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person...

Our love had begun in folly, and ended in madness!

He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on...

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.(John 11:25-26)

And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the...

When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come topeace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and findsuch a blessed sense of rest!

She had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that were very pretty and very good.

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of...

She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.

In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.

When the last autumn of Dickens’s life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades...

A day wasted on others is not wasted on one’s self.

The day before the Queen’s Ball, Father had a visitor–a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to her the enjoyment he...

—Pues bien; lo que yo quiero son realidades. No les enseñéis a estos muchachos y muchachas otra cosa que realidades. En la vida sólo son necesarias las realidades.

Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged...

Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain to wake from. Who, if this were death, would be roused...

They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defense of life; that would delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do...