Book Quotes · Reading Lists · Notes on Art and Music · Editorial Policy
A lone figure walking down a foggy path lined with old lamp posts

Charles Dickens Quotes, With the Chapter Each One Comes From

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

The best Charles Dickens quotes are rarely as solemn as they look on a poster. Pulled out of their scenes, they turn into mottoes; put back, they are jokes, threats, confessions and, now and then, the cleverest sentence in the chapter. Below are thirteen lines from A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House and three shorter books, each copied from the full text, with the chapter and the person speaking.

One thing to watch for: Dickens gives his best lines to people who are wrong. A beadle, a debtor, a schoolmaster obsessed with facts. The wisdom usually arrives in a funny voice.

Charles Dickens quotes that open and close books

1. The best of times

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us

Advertisement

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, chapter I, “The Period”

Everyone remembers the first clause, and almost nobody remembers where the sentence lands. It keeps going for several more lines and ends as satire: the period was so like the present that its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. The famous opening is a parody of people who can only speak in extremes.

2. A far, far better thing

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Third, chapter XV, “The Footsteps Die Out For Ever”

Sydney Carton never actually says this. Read the paragraph before it: the narrator explains that if Carton had given utterance to his thoughts at the guillotine, and they were prophetic, they would have been these. The most quoted last words in Victorian fiction are hypothetical, which is an oddly modest move for a novelist who rarely did anything by halves.

3. The hero question

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 1, “I Am Born”

A first sentence that admits the narrator might not be the main character in his own book. It is also a fair warning. For long stretches David is a watcher, and the people who take over his pages, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, are far louder than he is.

Dickens quotes in funny voices

4. Mr. Micawber’s arithmetic

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, chapter 12

Good advice from the worst possible source. Micawber, fresh out of the debtors’ prison, gives it to the boy David as the family prepares to leave London for Plymouth, and then lurches into a mock-tragic flourish about the god of day going down upon the dreary scene, concluding that you are in short you are for ever floored. The sixpence is the whole lesson.

5. More

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chapter II

Oliver has been chosen by lot: the starving boys hold a council, cast lots to decide who will ask, and it falls to him. He says the line twice, and the second time the master hits him with the ladle. What follows is the real joke: the workhouse board is told, and one gentleman in a white waistcoat announces that the boy will be hung. The request is tiny. The institutional panic is enormous.

6. Mr. Bumble on the law

“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass—a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, chapter LI

Bumble is told that, in law, a husband is presumed to control his wife, so he is responsible for what Mrs. Bumble did. His outburst is quoted by people who think the law is foolish, but the comedy is that Bumble is the one person in the room who knows exactly how little he controls his wife. The second sentence, about the bachelor, is the better joke and is almost always cut.

7. Gradgrind wants Facts

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.

Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book the First, chapter I, “The One Thing Needful”

The opening of Hard Times is a speech to a schoolroom, and the capital F does a lot of work. Dickens describes the speaker’s square forefinger and square wall of a forehead before he names him. In the next chapter a girl who has grown up around horses is unable to define one, and a boy who has never touched one recites it as a graminivorous quadruped.

8. How not to do it

Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, Book the First, chapter 10

Dickens then repeats the phrase, in small capitals and then in plain type, until it sounds like a liturgy. The chapter is a satire on government departments that still reads as current, and the Gutenberg edition prints the preface Dickens dated May 1857. Arthur Clennam spends the chapter being passed between Barnacles who all agree to do nothing politely.

Dickens quotes about weather, guilt and change

9. Fog everywhere

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter I, “In Chancery”

The first chapter of Bleak House is built from sentence fragments like these, piling up fog and mud until the Lord High Chancellor appears, sitting at the very heart of the fog. The parenthesis, (and dirty), is Dickens leaning in to make sure you did not miss the point. The same opening contains a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill, which we covered in the strangest sentences in classic literature.

10. The wind in the east

“She means well,” said Mr. Jarndyce hastily. “The wind’s in the east.”

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter VI, “Quite at Home”

John Jarndyce cannot bear to be thanked (in the same chapter we hear that he once escaped out the back when a grateful visitor came to his door), and whenever he is uneasy he blames the wind. It becomes a running signal through Esther’s narrative, and it pays off in the last chapter, where she says she has never known the wind to be in the east since the day he took her to the porch of her new house and showed her the name written over it. A whole relationship told through a weather report.

11. Marley and the door-nail

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave I, “Marley’s Ghost”

A ghost story that opens by insisting on the death certificate. The narrator then worries aloud that Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail is an odd simile, admits he would prefer a coffin-nail, and keeps the phrase anyway, because the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile. Scrooge’s reply to his nephew, Bah! and then Humbug!, arrives a few pages later.

12. Joe on partings

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together, as I may say, and one man’s a blacksmith, and one’s a whitesmith, and one’s a goldsmith, and one’s a coppersmith.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter XXVII

Joe Gargery has come to London to visit, and Pip, now a gentleman in training, has been ashamed of him all morning. Joe calls him “Sir” until this moment, then drops it. The metaphor is the only one a blacksmith would choose, and it is the wisest thing anyone says in the book. Pip does not realise it for years.

13. Estella, bent and broken

suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, chapter LIX

Estella speaks this in the final chapter, when she and Pip meet by chance on the cleared site of the old house. The dashes around I hope are the most important punctuation in the novel: she will not promise she has changed, only that she might have. Miss Havisham’s stopped clocks, the other great image of the book, appear in our collection of book quotes about time.

Quick reference: Dickens quotes by book and chapter

Quote fragment Speaker Book Chapter
It was the best of times Narrator A Tale of Two Cities Book 1, ch. I
a far, far better thing Carton (imagined) A Tale of Two Cities Book 3, ch. XV
the hero of my own life David David Copperfield ch. 1
result happiness Mr. Micawber David Copperfield ch. 12
I want some more Oliver Oliver Twist ch. II
the law is a ass Mr. Bumble Oliver Twist ch. LI
what I want is, Facts Gradgrind Hard Times Book 1, ch. I
HOW NOT TO DO IT Narrator Little Dorrit Book 1, ch. 10
Fog everywhere Narrator Bleak House ch. I
The wind’s in the east Mr. Jarndyce Bleak House ch. VI
Marley was dead Narrator A Christmas Carol Stave I
ever so many partings Joe Gargery Great Expectations ch. XXVII
bent and broken Estella Great Expectations ch. LIX

If you like the way Dickens hides a serious line in a comic voice, Jane Austen does the same with a lighter hand; see Jane Austen quotes, with the chapter each one comes from. For his contemporaries in Yorkshire, who wrote very differently about very similar injustices, try the Brontë sisters’ best lines.

One last detail worth checking for yourself: in chapter II of Oliver Twist, the boys’ daily ration is three meals of thin gruel, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays. Dickens lists it like a bureaucrat, which is what makes it so hard to read.

Sources

More to read

Looking for lines from modern novels? Browse Lucy’s own quote collection.

Owed money from a settlement? Check what is open at OpenClassActions.com. Caring for someone with dementia? Find practical guides at HelpDementia.com. Working out a skin routine? Evidence-based answers at AcneAdvocate.com. Forgot the name of a movie? Identify it at FindThisMovie.com. Was your data exposed? Track active breaches at DataBreachRadar.com.

We use cookies to run this site, measure how it’s used, and show ads. Choose “Essentials only” to limit cookies to what the site needs to work. Privacy Policy.