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Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

Charles Lamb

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Charles Lamb
Age: 59 †
Born: 1775
Born: February 10
Died: 1834
Died: December 27
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
London
England
Eye
Novels
Read
Extreme
Better
Extremes
Book
Listen
Without
Novel
Glide
Even
Modern
Incidents
Kind
Books
Hurry
Never
Interest
Quick

More quotes by Charles Lamb

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Half as sober as a judge.
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Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
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There are like to be short graces where the devil plays host.
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Gone before To that unknown and silent shore.
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To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
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How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me all are departed All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
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We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
Charles Lamb
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Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?
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To sigh, yet feel no pain To weep, yet scarce know why To sport an hour with Beauty's chain, Then throw it idly by.
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If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold!
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How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye?
Charles Lamb
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I conceive disgust at these impertinent and misbecoming familiarities inscribed upon your ordinary tombstone.
Charles Lamb
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You look wise, pray correct that error.
Charles Lamb
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If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick-bed. How the patient lords it there!
Charles Lamb
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Fly not yet 't is just the hour When pleasure, like the midnight flower That scorns the eye of vulgar light, Begins to bloom for sons of night And maids who love the moon.
Charles Lamb
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May be the truth is, that one pipe is wholesome, two pipes toothsome, three pipes noisome, four pipes fulsome, five pipes quarrelsome and that's the some on't.
Charles Lamb
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No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.
Charles Lamb
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Can we ring the bells backward? Can we unlearn the arts that pretend to civilize, and then burn the world? There is a march of science but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?
Charles Lamb
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Let us live for the beauty of our own reality.
Charles Lamb
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It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.
Charles Lamb