William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)
English Victorian writer.
This I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without a positive hump, may marry whom she likes.
Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press, my boy, ... of the fourth estate ... There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her couriers upon every road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets. They are ubiquitous.
The play is done; the curtain drops,
Slow falling to the prompter’s bell
A moment yet the actor stops
And looks around to say farewell.
It is an irksome word and task:
And when he’s laughed and said his say
He shows, as he removes the mask,
A face that’s anything but gay.
Despair is perfectly compatible with a good dinner, I promise you.
Except for the young or very happy, I can't say I am sorry for any one who dies.
Remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is —
A sort of soup or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo.
It is best to love wisely, no doubt; but to love foolishly is better than not to be able to love at all. Some of us can't: and are proud of our impotence, too.
Although I enter not,
Yet round about the spot
Ofttimes I hover;
And near the sacred gate
With longing eyes I wait,
Expectant of her.
The unambitious sluggard pretends that the eminence is not worth attaining, declines altogether the struggle, and calls himself a philosopher. I say he is a poor-spirited coward.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
As the gambler said of his dice, to love and win is the best thing, to love and lose is the next best.
Christmas is here:
Winds whistle shrill,
Icy and chill.
Little care we;
Little we fear
Weather without,
Sheltered about
The Mahogany Tree.
Thackeray is everybody's past — is everybody's youth. Forgotten friends flit about the passages of dreamy colleges and unremembered clubs; we hear fragments of unfinished conversations, we see faces without names for an instant, fixed forever in some trivial grimace: we smell the strong smell of social cliques now quite incongruous to us; and there stir in all the little rooms at once the hundred ghosts of oneself.
Ah! Vanitas vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied? — Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.
Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt; how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.
Charlotte, having seen his body
Borne before her on a shutter,
Like a well-conducted person,
Went on cutting bread and butter.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Good humour may be said to be one of the very best articles of dress one can wear in society.