Charles Lamb - Letters of Charles Lamb

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A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of non pertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of our prosperity.

Charles Lamb
Were I Diogenes, I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.

Charles Lamb
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.

Charles Lamb
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

Charles Lamb
What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by mode meals? A total blank.

Charles Lamb
I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature.

Charles Lamb
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!

Charles Lamb
The going away of friends does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A. but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables.

Charles Lamb
The fine lady, or fine gentleman, who show me their teeth, show me bones.

Charles Lamb
No work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itself,--the most unwholesome of food.

Charles Lamb
Positively, the best thing a man can have to do, is nothing, and next to that perhaps — good works.

Charles Lamb