"Throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most de…"

"Barkis is willin'."

"One day I realized my whole life has taught me Freudianism is nonsense. My father was a sociopath and an alcoholic, a…"

"One of Dickens’s most striking peculiarities is that, whenever in his writing he becomes emotional, he ceases instant…"

"There is a heartlessness behind his sentimentally overflowing style."

"I'm teaching Dickens now in my English class [at Berkeley], and the narrator is always an even distance away from the…"

"The art of Dickens was the most exquisite of arts: it was the art of enjoying everybody. Dickens, being a very human …"

"But we should get the whole Victorian perspective wrong, in my opinion at least, if we did not see that Dickens was p…"

"And on that grave where English oak and holly And laurel wreaths entwine, Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly, T…"

"Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way; he was the brotherhood of man, and k…"