Phoebe’s Reviews > A Tale of Two Cities > Status Update

“the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them.”

"To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity, under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste, mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness, and suffering."

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky."
That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed… As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit… from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired… of a hundred thousand muskets.

“In this respect the House was much on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly objectionable, but were only the more respectable.”

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital? … Why do you write in the public streets? Is there—tell me thou—is there no other place to write such words in?”

“The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was destruction.”