Important Quotations Explained
1. It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age
of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it
was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the
winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before
us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct
the other way . . .
2. A
wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted
to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn
consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one
of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating
heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some
of its imagin-ings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something
of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.
3. The
wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street
in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled.
It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet,
and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood,
left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who
nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound
about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of
the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one
tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag
of a night-cap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger
dipped in muddy wine-lees—blood.
4. Along
the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrels carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring
and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
are fused in one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in
France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf,
a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush
humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will
twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely
yield the same fruit according to its kind.
5. I
see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss,
and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and
defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this time
and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually
making expiation for itself and wearing out. . . .
I
see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see
him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by
the light of his. . . .
It is a far, far
better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far
better rest I go to than I have ever known.
