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“It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear solemn thunder, and to see the lightening; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are, and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage,…” p254

Ugh, Mr. Turveydrop. 🙄
These names though are always entertaining.

And even more characters! Jo and Jenny are just heartbreaking. Sentimental but in a good way.

Dickens makes such astute observations and with such eloquence. In awe sometimes. It’s also very amenable to audio with Miriam Margolyes.

So many characters!

“Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better, splashed to their very blinkers.” p1


“…who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them off, as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic Lilliput.” p12

“Nothing could be more precise, exact, and orderly than Greenleaf.” p25

“Someone had picked up the glass paperweight from the table and smashed it to pieces on the hearthstone.” p254

“Has it ever occurred to you” he said, “that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?” p265

“…reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” p285

“…made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity…and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.” p180

“What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles..had remained in this condition.” p191

“I’m good at spotting people who don’t belong. As soon as I saw you I knew you were against them.” p140

“No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.” p145

“…that sexual privation induced hysteria, desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship.” p153


“Privacy, he said, was a very valuable thing.” p159

“…had awakened in him a sort of nostalgia…in an armchair by an open fire with your feet in the fender and a kettle on the hob: utterly alone, utterly secure, with nobody watching you…” p111

“…the Middle Ages. The centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of any value. One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books.” p112

“Your worst enemy, he reflected was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.” p73

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” p81

“…helplessness took hold of Winston. The old man’s memory was nothing but a rubbish heap of details.” p105

“Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.” p35

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death?” p40

“Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” p61

“…to take more emphatic notice of him; …to be something more special in her remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be.” p218

“The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight…” p219

“Perhaps you might do better things than these - or different, so that there might not be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place.” p207

“…watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously.” p209

“…we all remember epochs in our own experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.” p211

“…he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal,…” p195 😂

“What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his;…a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.” p196

“All those rows of volumes - will you not now do what you used to speak of? - Will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world?” p200

“…and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,…” p193

“Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.” p194

“Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that they could no bear him,…” p179

“Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.” p180

“She had brought up her children to wear flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last habit she considered the chief reason why people needed doctors.” p169

“When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.” p170 😆

“He went through a great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust his motives, and make clear to himself what God’s glory required.” p156

“…one’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated.” p157

“…educated to a ridiculous pitch- what was the use of accomplishments which would be laid aside as she was married?” p 167

“For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.” p144

…character too is a process and an unfolding. The man was still in the making…” p149

“It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some course and act accordingly.” p137

“When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for us, we get only farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.” p138