Dickens quotes

We were put to Dickens as children but it never took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

- Alan Bennett
  The Old Country, act 2.

An episode out of George Orwell rewritten by Charles Dickens.

- (Alfred) Alistair Cooke
  Of Gerald R Ford's succession to the US presidency on Richard M Nixon's resignation. The Americans.

She was thinkingfor, since she had been formed by literature, she could think in no other waythat all this had been described in Dickens,Tolstoy, Hugo, Dostoevsky, and a dozen others. All that noble and terrific indignation had done nothing, achieved nothing, the shout of anger from the nineteenth century might as well have been silentfor here came the file of prisoners, handcuffed two by two, and on their faces was that same immemorial look of patient, sardonic understanding.

- Doris May ne  e Tayler Lessing
  Martha Quest, ch.2.

Dickens was not the first or the last novelist to find virtue more difficult to portray than the wish for it.

- Sir V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett
  'OliverTwist', collected in Books in General (1981).

   Think of the heroism of Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post-card? Who would project a serial novel, afterThackeray and Dickens had each fallen in mid-course? Who would find heart enough to begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?

- Robert Louis Stevenson
Virginibus Puerisque,'AesTriplex'.