A Tale of Two Cities- Quotes

A Tale of Two Cities quotes & explanation 1. It was the ruff of clocks, it was the worst of times, it was the hop on of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the duration 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 issue direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the different way. . . interpretation for quote 1 >> These famous lines, which open A Tale of Two Cities, prompting at the unfermenteds central tension between hit the sack and family, on the ane hand, and oppression and hatred, on the other. The passage makes marked phthisis of anaphora, the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of consecutive cla routinesfor example, it was the age . . . it was the age and it was the epoch . . . it was the epoch. . . This technique, along with the passages steady rhythm, suggests that expert and evil, wisdom and folly, and light and darkness stand equally matched in their struggle. The oppose pairs in this passage in addition initiate wiz of the novels most prominent motifs and structural figuresthat of doubles, including London and Paris, Sydney cartonful and Charles Darnay, Miss Pross and Madame Defarge, and Lucie and Madame Defarge. 2. A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is accomplished 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 give secret that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret that every beating nerve center in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imagin-ings, a secret to the heart nigh it Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. Explanation for Quotation 2 >> The cashier makes this reflection at the beginnin g of Book the First, Chapter 3, after Jerry Cruncher delivers a sibyllic message to Jarvis Lorry in the darkened mail coach.Lorrys tutelageto recover the long-imprisoned Doctor Manette and recall him to life sentenceestablishes the essential dilemma that he and other characters face namely, that human beings constitute perpetual mysteries to one some other and always remain somewhat locked away, never fully reachable by outside minds. This fundamental inscrutability proves most evident in the case of Manette, whose private sufferings force him to relapse throughout the novel into bouts of cobbling, an occupation that he initiative took up in prison.Throughout the novel, Manette mentally returns to his prison, bound to a greater extent by his own recollections than by any attempt of the other characters to recall him into the present. This passages reference to wipeout also evokes the deep secret revealed in Cartons self-sacrifice at the goal of the novel. The exact profundity of his fuck and devotion for Lucie remains obscure until he commits to dying for her the selflessness of his death leaves the reader to wonder at the ways in which he talent fork out manifested this great love in life. . The wine was red wine, and had varnished 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 stark naked feet, and many woody shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets and the frontal bone of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she infract roughly 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-leesblood. Explanation for Quotation 3 >> This passage, taken from Book the First, Chapter 5, describes the scramble after a wine cask breaks outside Defarges wine shop. This episode opens the novels examination of Paris and acts as a potent flick of the peasants hunger.These oppressed individuals are not only physically starvedand hence pass oning to slurp wine from the city streetsbut are also hungry for a new world order, for justice and freedom from misery. In this passage, daemon foreshadows the lengths to which the peasants desperation go forth take them. This scene is echoed later in the novel when the revolutionariesnow similarly smeared with red, but the red of blood make around the grindstone to sharpen their weapons.The emphasis here on the idea of staining, as well as the scrawling of the word blood, furthers this connection, as does the appearance of the wood-sawyer, who later scares Lucie with his bemock guillotine in Book the Third, Chapter 5. Additionally, the image of the wine lapping against naked feet anticipates the final showdown between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge in Book the Third, Chapter 14 The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet of Madame Defarge. By strange canful ways, and through much staining of blood, those feet had come to meet that water. 4.Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, labour and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the days wine to La Guillotine. wholly 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 compartmentalisation of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which bequeath 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 evidence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same crop acco rding to its kind. Explanation for Quotation 4 >> In this concise and pretty passage, which occurs in the final chapter of the novel, devil summarizes his ambivalent attitude toward the french Revolution. The origin stops decidedly short of justifying the violence that the peasants use to overturn the societal order, personifying La Guillotine as a sort of drunken schoolmaster who consumes human livesthe days wine. Nevertheless, Dickens shows a thorough arrest of how such violence and bloodlust can come about. The cruel grandeurs oppression of the poor sows the same seed of rapacious license in the poor and compels them to persecute the aristocracy and other enemies of the revolution with equal brutality. Dickens perceives these revolutionaries as crushed . . . out of shape and having beenhammered . . . into . . . tortured forms. These depictions evidence his belief that the pass up classes fundamental goodness has been perverted by the terrible conditions under which t he aristocracy has forced them to live. 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 have on 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 do illustrious there by the light of his. . . . It is a far, far punter thing that I do, than I have ever done it is a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known. Explanation for Quotation 5 >>Though much knock over has arisen regarding the value and meaning of Sydney Cartons sacrifice at the end of the novel, the surest key to interpretation rests in the thoughts contained in this passage, which the narrator attributes to Carton as he awai ts his sacrificial death. This passage, which occurs in the final chapter, prophesies two resurrections one personal, the other national. In a novel that seeks to examine the nature of revolutionthe overturning of one way of life for anotherthe struggles of France and of Sydney Carton mirror each other.Here, Dickens articulates the outcome of those struggles just as Paris will rise from the abyss of the French Revolutions chaotic and bloody violence, so too will Carton be reborn into glory after a nearly wasted life. In the prophecy that Paris will become a beautiful cityand that Cartons name will be made illustrious, the reader sees evidence of Dickenss faith in the essential goodness of humankind. The very last thoughts attributed to Carton, in their poetic use of repetition, register this faith as a calm and soothing certainty.