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This reminds me, Godmother, to ask you a serious question. You are as wise as wise can be (having been brought up by the fairies), and you can tell me this: Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never to have had it?

Charles Dickens

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Charles Dickens
Age: 58 †
Born: 1812
Born: February 7
Died: 1870
Died: June 9
Author
Editor
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Social Critic
Writer
Landport
Hampshire
Dickens
C.Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens
Boz
Better
Fairy
Thing
Brought
Good
Question
Never
Serious
Wise
Asks
Godmother
Lost
Fairies
Tell
Reminds

More quotes by Charles Dickens

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Are you thankful for not being young?' 'Yes, sir. If I was young, it would all have to be gone through again, and the end would be a weary way off, don't you see?
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Love, however, is very materially assisted by a warm and active imagination: which has a long memory, and will thrive, for a considerable time, on very slight and sparing food.
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My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time.
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Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy and some, in their sadness, a history.
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We must scrunch or be scrunched.
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The American woman is a monstrosity.
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No one has the least regard for the man with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and must die.
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It was the beginning of a day in June the deep blue sky unsullied by a cloud, and teeming with brilliant light. The streets were, as yet, nearly free from passengers, the houses and shops were closed, and the healthy air of morning fell like breath from angels, on the sleeping town.
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I am a neat hand at cookery, and I'll tell you what I knocked up for my Christmas-eve dinner in the Library Cart. I knocked up a beefsteak-pudding for one, with two kidneys, a dozen oysters, and a couple of mushrooms thrown in. It's a pudding to put a man in good humour with everything, except the two bottom buttons of his waistcoat.
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There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories - Ghost Stories, or more shame for us - round the Christmas fire and we have never stirred, except to draw a little nearer to it.
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She was too intent upon her work, and too earnest in what she said, and too composed and quiet altogether, to be on the watch for any look he might direct towards her in reply so the shaft of his ungrateful glance fell harmless, and did not wound her.
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My daughter, there are times of moral danger when the hardest virtuous resolution to form is flight, and when the most heroic bravery is flight.
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I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday I am - what shall I say I am today?
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I fear your kind and open communication, which has rendered me more painfully conscious of my own defects, has not improved me, sighed Kate.
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And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love - of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!
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Gold, for the instant, lost its luster in his eyes, for there were countless treasures of the heart which it could never purchase
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A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world!
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All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!
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Women can always put things in fewest words. Except when it's blowing up and then they lengthens it out.
Charles Dickens
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It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.
Charles Dickens