Cassandra 's Key Ideas from A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens

No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.

Death is Nature’s remedy for all things

A good opportunity for consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for yourself

Repression is the only lasting philosophy

My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have lived

Better to be a rational creature and accept your natural destiny

You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been laden

If ever there were love in the world, I love her

I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse

I am like one who died young. All my life might have been

I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul

A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it

You kindled me, heap of ashes that I am, into fire

Nothing that we do, is done in vain

So wicked do destruction and secrecy appear to honest minds

Dust he was and to dust he must return

Desperate games are played for desperate stakes

I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age