Mr. Dickens and His Carol

Children were an act of optimism—sheer belief that the future will outshine the present.

...a good biography tells us the truth about a person; a good story, the truth about ourselves.

We are all lost, all broken. Trying desperately to be whole again.

Words were inadequate, but all he had. He didn't know where they came from or why, but it was how we told one another what the world was and might be. Who we were, and might become. It was the only magic he had. Everything else was faith. He felt blessed and grateful.

Never mind necessity, melancholy is the mother of invention.

What magic there was all around him. Words were inadequate, but all he had. He didn't know where they came from or why, but it was how we told one another what the world was and might be. Who we were, and might become. It was the only magic he had. Everything else was faith.

Oh, to be young and on the stage, playing with fire, sitting on babies, falling off scaffolding... and all with no harm or injury, in fact, the coroner need never be called!

The critics simply build us up that they might then describe in some detail the very moment in which we fall from the heavens, where they themselves have installed us, and land, splat, on our faces, naked and writhing and useless.

I inspire myself! To write a recluse? Who hates his neighbors, bemoans his friends, and despises his relatives? They're hateful people. They hound him for money, The poor man is tormented by his tribe of dependent, who all want a bit or a piece of him an cannot make a single step in the world without his aid!

Dickens knew the deception well, but he smiled nonetheless, not for the brilliance of its execution—it was on the sloppy end of magic tricks—but for the truth at the bottom of every illusion, every fiction, every lie: our own great desire to believe.

When one’s whereabouts are hard come by, a city is an impression of itself, a kaleidoscope of not-quite-right things, a variegated jumble of place and memory, all that is and once was.

People had a way of looking past him.