#dickens

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 of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation? Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute? ↗

— Dan Simmons

#charles-dickens #death #life #old-age #regret

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

#cool #cool thing #dickens #going #great

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#art

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#uncle-tom-s-cabin #victorian #wilde #witty #death

As I know only too well, anticipation od happiness can sometimes be as gratifying as its consummation. Even during the first months of my separation, every footstep on the pavement would have me racing to the window, and every ring of the doorbell would set my heart beating as fast as a bird's. But as the months went by without even a word, I gradually had to relinquish my hopes of seeing him again. It was not easy to do so, and I am not sure whether I have managed it entirely; however I did stop waking with that thought in my head, imagining what he was doing every hour of the day, and whether his journey would by chance take him past my door. I tried to tell myself instead that I was fortunate in my neglect; that now I needed have no fear that he would arrive and his gimlet eye start to anatomize the cushions, or the curtains, or the state of the fireplace; that now, at last, my life was my own. But truth to tell, I would have given anything to see him walk with his jaunty step up to my front door and rap out a cheerful rhythm with his silver-topped cane. ↗

— Gaynor Arnold

#imagination

My dad is kind of a rascal, like in a Dickensian sense. He just goes from career to career. ↗

— Benjamin Walker

#dad #dickensian #goes #just #kind

We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off. ↗

— Alan Bennett

#dickens #had #humanity #me #never

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene. ↗

— David McCullough

#i #i love #love #scene #sets

Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman. ↗