Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834)
English essayist and poet, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced along with his sister, Mary Lamb.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.
Returning to town in the stage-coach, which was filled with Mr. Gilman's guests, we stopped for a minute or two at Kentish Town. A woman asked the coachman, "Are you full inside?" Upon which Lamb put his head through the window and said, "I am quite full inside; that last piece of pudding at Mr. Gilman's did the business for me."
A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game.
When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, 'Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!'
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.
Sunday itself—that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out of it …
Not if I know myself at all.
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your presence of body came to be called in question by it.
Thou through such a mist dost show us,
That our best friends do not know us.
Sentimentally I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.
Nursed amid her [London's] noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes?
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
Please to blot out gentle hearted, and substitute drunken dog, ragged head, seld-shaven, odd-ey'd, stuttering, or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the Gentleman in question.
[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.
It argues an insensibility.
I have done all that I came into this world to do. I have worked task work, and have the rest of the day to myself.