Charles Dickens Quotes

We used to listen to Lionel Barrymore do 'A Christmas Carol' on the radio long ago, and I like Reginald Owen, who played Scrooge in the first treatment for the screen. But my favorite Scrooge was Alastair Sim. He was enchanting, an absolutely beautiful performance.

'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.

I have nothing against undertakers personally. It's just that I wouldn't want one to bury my sister.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can't louse it up.

For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.

Marley was dead: to begin with.

Old Marley was dead as a doornail... The wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile.

People love to hate the gravedigger.

Go now, verses, on your light feet, you have not trodden hard on the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests, the one corpse stacked on top of the other. Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.

It gives a fellow an awful shiver to hear the first shovelful of dirt and gravel rattle down upon the coffin; but after it is covered, it falls gently and makes no sound. The feeling of rest is perfect. There's no more nagging, no more pain!

You look like a talent scout for a cemetery.

There are no furloughs for victims. There is no return from the grave.

When among the graves of thy fellows, walk with circumspection; thine own is open at thy feet.

Jesus ruined every funeral he attended including his own.

I got the sexton, who was digging Linton's grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there, when I saw her face again - it is hers yet - he had hard work to stir me; but he said it would change, if the air blew on it.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.

It's not the COUGH that carries you OFF. . . . It's the COFFIN they carry you OFF IN.

There's a coffin in the back of the church as the wedding is going on ... Look, I'm a romantic. I like marriage...In the movies.

Peace is a certificate you get in the grave.

A little time, and thou shalt close thy eyes; and him who has attended thee to thy grave, another soon will lament.

A grave is such a quiet place.