Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb
Charles Lambwas an English writer and essayist, best known for his Essays of Elia and for the children's book Tales from Shakespeare, which he produced with his sister, Mary Lamb...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth10 February 1775
disappointment feelings curiosity
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever puts one down without the feeling of disappointment.
life success giving
Riches are chiefly good because they give us time.
prayer giving-up book
Shakespeare is one of the last books one should like to give up, perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.
book mind
She unbent her mind afterwards - over a book.
men recipes dull
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
blessed veins irony
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
thinking wife childhood
Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!
doors sound rural-life
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and all rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
book reading jealous
There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.
law ears pistols
A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
wall tired air
I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!
friendship inspiring funny-best-friend
Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected.
age aging grows
I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.
men association gains
We gain nothing by being with such as ourselves. We encourage one another in mediocrity. I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.