The History of Pendennis Quotes

“Perhaps all early love affairs ought to be strangled or drowned, like so many blind kittens.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

“What part of confidante has that poor teapot played ever since the kindly plant was introduced among us! Why myriads of women have cried over it, to be sure! [...] Nature meant very kindly by women when she made the tea plant; and with a little thought, what series of pictures and groups of the fancy may conjure up and assemble round the teapot and cup.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

“How lonely we are in the world; how selfish and secret, everybody!”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis

“Pendennis, sir," he said, "your idleness is incorrigible and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed! Miserable trifler! A boy who construes de and, instead of de but, at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age. Go on, sir, and I warn you that the very next mistake that you make shall subject you to the punishment of the rod. Who's that laughing? What ill-conditioned boy is there that dares to laugh?" shouted the Doctor.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis

“It may be whispered to those uninitiated people who are anxious to know the habits and make the acquaintance of men of letters, that there are no race of people who talk about books, or, perhaps, who read books, so little as literary men.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy

“his first and only love, whom he had adored ever since when? – ever since yesterday, ever since for ever.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes And Misfortunes, His Friends And His Greatest Enemy

“Every man, however brief or inglorious may have been his academical career, must remember with kindness and tenderness the old university comrades and days. The young man's life is just beginning: the boy's leading-strings are cut, and he has all the novel delights and dignities of freedom. He has no idea of cares yet, or of bad health, or of roguery, or poverty, or to-morrow's disappointment.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis: His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy