Quotable Friday (23)

I've mentioned my love for Charles Dickens, and A Tale of Two Cities in particular many times on this blog. I have quoted the opening passage before - perhaps one of the most famous passages in all history. But to show that A Tale of Two Cities is so much more than the first paragraph, here are some of my other favourite quotations from that marvellous book. Read it!

Romance: "I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul."

Humour: "Mr. Cruncher... always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it."

The wonder of humans: "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!"

Sacrifice: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done..." [These words - spoken by one of my favourite characters in literature - would be a candidate for a book tattoo if I ever felt the need to get one.]

There were so many fabulous quotations, I had trouble choosing. Here is a final one that makes me laugh every time. I love Charles Dickens's dry humour.

"That, they never could lay their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never tolerate the idea of their wives laying their heads upon their pillows; that, they could never endure the notion of their children laying their heads on their pillows; in short , that there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon pillows at all, unless the prisioner's head was taken off."