Charles Dickens Workhouse Quotes & Sayings

My idea is to bring out the inner child that my generation has inside, which does not go to sleep because of so much angst over the day-to-day routine. With so much going on, you start tuning out emotions and surprises. — Thalia

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter. — Charles Dickens

And what an example of the power of dress young Oliver Twist was! Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; - it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society. But now he was enveloped in the old calico robes, that had grown yellow in the same service; he was badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once - a parish child - the orphan of a workhouse - the humble, half-starved drudge - to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all, and pitied by none. — Charles Dickens

Although I had never believed in magic before, on that particular morning the world of magic became alive rather real. — Ramona Matta

Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with appalling realities behind and before. — Louise Imogen Guiney

Now this... this is why humans did such stupid things for love. To feel this heady sense of belonging and connection, this temporary abatement of perpetual loneliness. — Stacey Kade

You don't appreciate the things that come easy. The things we fight for are the things we keep with us forever. — Shelly Crane

If they would but think how hard it is for the very poor to have engendered in their hearts, that love of home from which all domestic virtues spring, when they live in dense and squalid masses where social decency is lost, or rather never found ... and [those who rule] strive to improve the wretched dwellings in bye-ways where only Poverty may walk ... In hollow voices from Workhouse, Hospital, and jail, this truth is preached from day to day, and has been proclaimed for years. — Charles Dickens

Christmas was always a big holiday in our family. Every Christmas Eve before we'd go to bed, my mom and dad would read to us two or three stories and they would always be 'The Happy Prince,' 'The Gift of the Magi' and 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,' and I would like to keep that alive. — Cameron Mathison

I know you and I know the way you feel, but you have to listen to me. The time has not yet come. It may never come. You may think I'm wrong in this, but if you close your eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what you would wish just because you're the Mother Confessor and feel responsible for the people of the Midlands, then there is no reason for us to bother hoping we'll be together again because we won't. We will be dead, and the cause of freedom will be dead. — Terry Goodkind

We are dominated on this planet by a fear-based rather than a love-based thought system. — Marianne Williamson

Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion. — Richard Dawkins

An average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV by age eighteen. — Greg Nettle

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy. — Jerry A. Coyne

He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exact than anything they may say. — Walter Benjamin

People come to this country from all over the world to pursue their dreams of driving a taxi or selling hot dogs or working in a sweatshop. — Greg Giraldo

The agony of my feelings allowed me no respite; no incident occurred from which my rage and misery could not extract its food. — Mary Shelley