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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
Read
Extreme
Better
Extremes
Book
Listen
Without
Novel
Glide
Even
Modern
Incidents
Kind
Books
Hurry
Never
Interest
Quick
Eye
Novels

More quotes by Charles Lamb

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Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
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I know that a sweet child is the sweetest thing in nature, not even excepting the delicate creatures which bear them.
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A babe is fed with milk and praise.
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Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with its usual severity.
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Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.
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Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright, Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.
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Shall I ask the brave soldier who fights by my side In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?
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The world meets nobody half way.
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To pile up honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness.
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The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
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A presentation copy...is a copy of a book whoch does not sell, sent you by the author, with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it for which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship if a brother author, he expects from you a book of yours, which does not sell, in return.
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Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
Charles Lamb
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The laws of Pluto's kingdom know small difference between king and cobbler, manager and call-boy and, if haply your dates of life were conterminant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by cheek (O ignoble levelling of Death) with the shade of some recently departed candle-snuffer.
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No woman dresses below herself from mere caprice.
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Is it a stale remark to say that I have constantly found the interest excited at a playhouse to bear an exact inverse proportion to the price paid for admission?
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Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which who listen had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.
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In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
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A child's nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another being.
Charles Lamb
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Dehortations from the use of strong liquors have been the favourite topic of sober declaimers in all ages, and have been received with abundance of applause by water-drinking critics. But with the patient himself, the man that is to be cured, unfortunately their sound has seldom prevailed.
Charles Lamb
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We are nothing less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.
Charles Lamb