A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations Quotes

“May the Devil carry away these idiots!”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations

“So throughout life our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son’t, you must be a common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can’t sit and write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet—Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z. And I know what that is to do, though I can’t say I’ve exactly done it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels

“Always the same with you people!”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations

“All things ran their course.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities / Great Expectations

“What the Devil, I say again!" exclaimed the gaoler,”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations

“All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels

“sobs strike against”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations: Two Novels

“Pip thinks himself better than every one else, and yet anybody can snub him;”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“it was one of those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“all the company at the grand hotel of Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally correct.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“much discoursing with spirits went on—and it did a world of good which never became manifest.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies for imaginary disorders that never existed,”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing of the country of her birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most agreeable characteristics.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and perseverance.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“Dickens knows that an outbreak is seldom a tragedy; generally it is the avoidance of a tragedy. All the real tragedies are silent.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“It is somewhat nationally significant that when we talk of the man in the street it means a figure silent, slouching, and even feeble. When the French speak of the man in the street, it means danger in the street.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things; he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“Now for all its blood and its black guillotines, the French Revolution was full of mere high spirits. Nay, it was full of happiness. This actual lilt and levity Carlyle never really found in the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“One note of the Revolution was the thing which silly people call optimism, and sensible people call high spirits. Carlyle could never quite get it, because with all his spiritual energy he had no high spirits.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations

“It is here that he has most clearly the plain mark of the man of genius; that he can understand what he does not understand.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations