Food for Thought from Charles Dickens

3 comments on “Food for Thought from Charles Dickens”

1. Adam 12 says:

   May 3, 2013 at 6:25 pm

   A lovely sentiment perhaps more aptly credited to a Dickens character, Pip from Great Expectations.

2. jhp says:

   May 3, 2013 at 9:40 pm

   … or in the case of Scrooge, one [b]very[/b] memorable night.

3. Kendall Harmon says:

   May 4, 2013 at 5:35 pm

   Many thanks for the comments. I posted it this way because I believe it reflects the thinking of Dickens himself (about which I may be incorrect). The citation is indeed from Great Expectations, Chapter 9, as Adam12 says in comment #1.

   It is perhaps worth citing the full quote from that book:

   When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget Joe’s recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith: how thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used to do” when I was at Miss Havisham’s; as though I had been there weeks or months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.

   That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.