"A smattering of everything, and a knowledge of nothing."
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Charles Dickens quotes (page 38 of 52)
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"I could not help wondering in my own mind....how it came to pass that our joints of meat were of such extraordinary shapes - and whether our butcher contracted for all the deformed sheep that came into the world; but I kept my reflections to myself."
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"The wine-shops breed, in physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution."
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"You can't make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn't do it when your uncle George was living much less when he's dead."
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"Why then we should drop into poetry."
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"Love is not a feeling to pass away Like the balmy breath of a Summer's day....... Love is not a passion of earthly mould As a thirst for honour, or fame, or gold"
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"-Why don't you cry again, you little wretch? -Because I'll never cry for you again."
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"...and to-morrow looked in my face more steadily than I could look at it"
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"All partings foreshadow the great final one."
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"and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces."
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"Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."
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"And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her, but always miserable."
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"I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it."
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"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. 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's opportunity misused!"
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"There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat."
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"I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures; or of a piece of music of mine, who had no ear for music."
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"I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for."
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"The very dogs were all asleep, and the flies, drunk with moist sugar in the grocer's shop, forgot their wings and briskness, and baked to death in dusty corners of the window."
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"And what about the cash, my existence's jewel?"
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"I don't suppose there's a man going, as possesses the fondness for youth that I do. There's youth to the amount of eight hundredpound a-year, at Dotheboys Hall at this present time. I'd take sixteen hundred pound worth, if I could get 'em, and be as fond of every individual twenty pound among 'em as nothing should equal it!"
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