Quote #53

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.

More from William Makepeace Thackeray

  1. When you look at me, when you think of me, I am in paradise.
  2. The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
  3. Next to excellence, comes the appreciation of it.
  4. Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of …
  5. A good laugh is sunshine in the house.
  6. George, be a King!
  7. It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England.
  8. Bravery never goes out of fashion.

All William Makepeace Thackeray quotes