Great Dickens Quotes

#1. I'm not saying that people have to listen to rock music. It's a great, cool thing and it can really be liberating for a lot of people but, hey, so can Charles Dickens so I'm not going to judge.

Frank Black

#2. The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again, and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood alone there in the calm morning air, with red upon it that the sun had never give, and would never take away.

Charles Dickens

#3. You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie.
'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.'
'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.'
'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.

Nick Hornby

#4. My great-aunt ... said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens ... She was right.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#5. 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.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#6. Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

Julian Barnes

#7. 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.

Charles Dickens

#8. Matthew and I used to read Dickens together. Oh my god, it was so great. We would sit in the bathtub and pass the book back and forth reading passages out loud.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#9. The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

Jennifer Egan

#10. Sure, at heart I wanted to be a Dickens, but I hated being great on command.

Rachel Heffington

#11. I'm totally obsessed with Dickens, and 'Great Expectations' was one of the first book's I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl.

Paul Rhys

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

Charles Dickens

#13. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.

G.K. Chesterton

#14. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.

Garrison Keillor

#15. Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#16. We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.

Charles Dickens

#17. 'Great Expectations' has been described as 'Dickens's harshest indictment of society.' Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.

Felix Dennis

#18. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.

Truman Capote

#19. So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! ...

Charles Dickens

#20. GREAT EXPECTATIONS [1867 Edition] by Charles Dickens [Project Gutenberg Editor's Note: There is also another version of this work etext98/grexp10.txt scanned from a different edition]

Anonymous

#21. The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.'

Karin Slaughter

#22. It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.

Ally Carter

#23. Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

Rebecca Miller

#24. After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

Claire Tomalin

#25. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.

Judith Flanders

#26. 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 to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pitty in all the glittering multitude.

Charles Dickens

#27. Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'

Matthew Pearl