I read Great Expectations fresh after a breakup. It felt like Dickens was speaking directly to me. The twisted mess of hope, regret, and longing I was living through. I became obsessed with Pip the same way he was obsessed with Estella.
His blind devotion, his desperate need to prove himself, and his confusion between love and illusion. It was as if I was looking into a mirror. And what struck me the most in this Dickens’ bildungsroman was that he doesn’t just tell a story about one boy’s rise and fall. He talks about the universal ache of wanting something or someone who can never be yours.
If you’ve never read Charles Dickens’ works, you probably won’t know the kind of impact his words leave on you. He wrote too many tender yet powerful lines to keep to myself. I want others to read some of the best quotes from Great Expectations, in the hope that they will move them the way it has moved me.
1. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
2. “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.”
3. “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before — more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”
4. “We need never be ashamed of our tears.”
5. “Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces — and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper — love her, love her, love her!”
6. “The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. … Once for all; I loved her nonetheless because I knew it…”
7. “In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”
8. “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been.”
9. “So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.”
10. “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.”
11. “I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief.”
12. “I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.”
13. “If you can’t get to be uncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ’em, Pip, and live well and die happy.”
14. “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home.”
15. “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
16. “It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.”
17. “I am what you designed me to be. I am your blade. You cannot now complain if you also feel the hurt.”
18. “In seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences… that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased.”
19. “We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe… I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my heart.”
20. “There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did.”
21. “And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?”
22. “You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read… To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character.”
23. “Dear Magwitch, I must tell you… You had a child once, whom you loved and lost… She is living now. She is a lady and very beautiful. And I love her!”
24. “Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures, hover about a lighted candle.”
25. “In trying to become a gentleman, I had succeeded in becoming a snob.”
Some of the best quotes from Great Expectations have always reminded me that I am not alone. His words have a way of finding those hidden corners of the heart and speaking the truth we sometimes cannot voice ourselves. They’ve reached the deepest and wounded parts of me and healed me. I hope his sentences become your companion too and comfort you when you need it the most. Drop your favorite Dickens’ quotes if I have missed any.
