Favorite Quotes!

[ConnieAnnKirk]

What is your favorite quote from A CHRISTMAS CAROL? Do you have more than one? Let us know a favorite quote and why you like it!

[songgirl7]

My two favorites by far are in the first stave:

"Marley was dead to begin with." I think that is one of the most brilliant opening lines ever! Imagine the people who would have been reading this for the first time, without having ever seen a movie or stage version. What an attention-grabber!

and

"Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas." I just love Dickens' prose here.

[johns]

"...for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself."

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Love these! Keep 'em coming!

~ConnieK

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johns wrote:
"...for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself."

---

[foxycat]

"Bah!"

[earp30wyatt]

"God BLESS US, EVERYONE!" I love that so much. Used it as toast at a Charles Dickens Christmas party I did for my bookclub. Then I found a print that says that in a catalog,and of course, I had to have it, so I bought it to hang in my livingroom during the holidays!

[dulcinea3]

"Old Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. 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 door-nail."

As a child, I found this fascinating, and have always remembered that phrase and associated it with the beginning of this story. And the humor in it gives us an idea of what is to come, and Dickens' style!

[ConnieAnnKirk]

So true! Such a great opening, and the "musing" on the doornail keeps the tone going right from the start!

~ConnieK

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dulcinea3 wrote:
"Old Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. 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 door-nail."

As a child, I found this fascinating, and have always remembered that phrase and associated it with the beginning of this story. And the humor in it gives us an idea of what is to come, and Dickens' style!

---

[JesseBC]

Favorite funny quote: "Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore..."

Favorite moving quote: The whole passage beginning, "Oh, cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death..." when Scrooge is with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

Favorite apocryphal story about a quote: When the local community theatre was putting on yet another one of many terrible amateur adaptations of the novel and was auditioning kids for the role of Tiny Tim. The little boy to be cast needed to be very small in order to emphasize Tim's stunted growth, so they're auditioning really young boys and they decide to use, arguably, the most famous line from the book, "God bless us, every one."

Now, of course, this line means, "May God bless each one of us," but young kids don't quite get that. So one small would-be Tim got up in front of the auditors, threw out his arms, and screamed at the top of his lungs, "GOD BLESS US, EVERYBODY!"

I think he got the part too.