Better to be a rational creature and accept your natural destiny

Repression is the only lasting philosophy

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

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.

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, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way

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

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other

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

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

A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Dickens' greatest historical novel, traces the private lives of a group of people caught up in the cataclysm of the French Revolution and the Terror. Dickens based his historical detail on Carlyle's great work - The French Revolution. 'The best story I have written' was Dickens' own verdict on A Tale of Two Cities, and the reader is unlikely to disagree with this judgement of a story which combines historical fact with the author's unsurpassed genius for poignant tales of human suffering, self-sacrifice, and redemption.

DICKENS

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