6 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Charles Dickens wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Everything Charles Dickens published is in the public domain, so his quotations can be checked against the books themselves rather than against each other. Every line here is verified verbatim against the complete texts.
What that checking mostly catches is not invention but erosion: the famous sentences are quoted shorter and smoother than Dickens wrote them. Two cases are documented below.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
Accurate as far as it goes, and it stops after eleven words. Dickens's sentence keeps going through ten paired opposites — wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, hope and despair — and the accumulation is the effect the short version removes.
Micawber says “nineteen nineteen and six.” The circulating version drops the “and,” which turns a spoken sum into a written one and loses the rhythm of a man reciting his own ruin.
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.
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.
Please, sir, I want some more.
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.
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.
I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
It runs far past the eleven words usually quoted: best of times and worst of times, age of wisdom and of foolishness, epoch of belief and of incredulity, season of Light and of Darkness, spring of hope and winter of despair — and then continues still further before the sentence ends.
“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.” They are Sydney Carton's, imagined as he goes to the guillotine in Charles Darnay's place.
Yes — in the workhouse, after the starving boys draw lots to decide who will ask. Dickens follows it with the master turning very pale.
Mr Micawber's rule from David Copperfield: twenty pounds of income against nineteen nineteen and six of expenditure is happiness; against twenty pounds and sixpence it is misery. Sixpence is the entire difference, which is the joke and the tragedy, since Micawber never manages the happy side of it.
Usually accurately but rarely completely. His most quoted sentences are long, and circulation shortens them — the Tale of Two Cities opening loses most of its clauses, and Micawber's arithmetic loses a word. The full versions are on this page.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Charles Dickens page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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