Quotes

A dark horse, which had never been thought of, and which the careless St James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grand stand in sweeping triumph.

In England when a new character appears in our circles, the first question always is, “Who is he?” In France it is, “What is he?” In England, “How much a year?” In France, “What has he done?”

A good eater must be a good man; for a good eater must have a good digestion, and a good digestion depends upon a good conscience.

To be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.

This was the universe about which we have read so much and never before felt: the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds. How could anything moving so fast not crash.

The microcosm of a public school.

How do you know that love is gone? If you said that you would be there at seven, you get there by nine and he or she has not called the police yet—it’s gone.

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Writers are always selling someone out.

It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.

If your little savage were left to himself and to his native blindness, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion—he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre

My life closed twice before its close.

On peut tromper quelques hommes, ou les tromper tous dans certains lieux & en certain tems [sic], mais non pas tous les hommes dans tous les lieux & dans tous les siècles .

Yet never met this fellow,

The Pedigree of Honey

I never spoke with God

If I can stop one Heart from breaking

Much Madness is divinest Sense—

I never saw a Moor.

Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?

Alter! When the hills do—

I like to see it lap the Miles—

I died for beauty—but was scarce

Because I could not stop for Death—He kindly stopped for me—.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Inebriate of air am I,

Surgeons must be very careful

These are the days when Birds come back—

I want to be something so much worthier than the doll in the doll’s house.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.

You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with.

You know, in a general way, what being a reference means. A person who can’t pay, gets another person who can’t pay, to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs, to guarantee that he has got two natural legs.

Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to make is, that he has great expectations.

I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced had no existence.

There is a wisdom of the Head, and . . . a wisdom of the Heart.

I expect a Judgment. On the day of Judgment.

I call them [Miss Flite’s birds] the Wards in Jarndyce. They are caged up with all the others. With Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach!

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!

“Not to put too fine a point upon it”—a favorite apology for plain-speaking with Mr Snagsby.

“She is the child of the universe.” “The universe makes rather an indifferent parent, I am afraid.”

This is a London particular. . . . A fog, miss.

Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. . . . The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here [to the Court of Chancery]!