Important Quotes From Tale Of Two Cities

What Actually Matters When You're Pulling Quotes

People always want the famous ones first. They show up at readings and seminars reciting "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" like they just discovered language. That line is important, sure. But if you only memorize the opening paragraph, you're missing most of what makes the book worth anything. I've sat through enough student presentations to know where this goes wrong. The quotes that actually matter are the ones that carry weight through the entire narrative. Not just the pretty ones. The ugly ones. The ones that make you uncomfortable when you're writing a paper at 11pm and you realize you've been quoting Dickens as if he's giving you life advice when he's really holding up a mirror to revolution and complicity.

Important Quotes From Tale Of Two Cities

Let me just get the obvious one out of the way. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" opens the novel and sets up the central tension Dickens is working with throughout the whole thing. Paradox as structure. He's not being clever for cleverness' sake. Every other major quote in the book traces back to this idea that reality contains its opposite simultaneously. The French Revolution isn't just bad or just. It's both, and the tension between those two states is where the story lives. Then there's Sydney Carton's final line: "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done." This one gets quoted constantly, usually stripped of context. People post it on Instagram over pictures of sunsets. What they miss is that Carton says this immediately before walking to the guillotine. He's not delivering a motivational speech. He's acknowledging that his redemption is purchased with his death. The quote works because everything before it has been about a man who wasted his life. Without that setup, the line is empty. With it, the line breaks you. "Recall me. Recall him. Recalld him to you." Three times. That's what Madame Defarge says to the jury before Charles Darnay is sentenced to die. It's one of the most chilling lines in the book because it's so simple. She's not using theatrical language. She's giving instructions. The repetition does the work. I remember copying this into a notebook during a undergrad seminar and sitting with it for a long time after class. That's when you know a quote has landed.

Madame Defarge herself exists almost entirely through action, but her knitting is a quote of a different kind. Dickens never gives her a monologue about revolution. She just knits names into her work while the storm gathers. If you're looking for her defining moment, it's not a speech. It's the image of her sitting there, recording the deaths of people who haven't died yet. That's the novel's most quietly terrifying passage, and it doesn't use a single exclamation point. Dr. Manette's letter at the end is worth something too. "I pray you, let my name be erased, and my story forgotten." It's the voice of a man who survived torture only to realize survival was the harder part. You hear this throughout the book in small moments, but the letter makes it explicit. Manette spent eighteen years in a prison making shoes, and when he gets out, he can't rebuild his life. The quote matters because it undercuts the happy ending. The Bastille doesn't stop existing just because the characters walk out of it. Here's the thing nobody tells you about working with these quotes. The problem isn't finding them. It's using them without sounding like you're performing intelligence. I had a TA once who wrote an entire paragraph analyzing "best of times, worst of times" without once mentioning the sentence that comes after it about hope and despair. She was so busy establishing that the opening was "profound" that she forgot to actually read the paragraph. It happens constantly. The fix is to always quote the full passage, not just the line you remember from a poster.

Another issue people run into is treating the book as a straight political statement. It's not. Dickens sympathizes with the oppressed but he also understands how oppression recreates itself in new forms. The Marquis St. Evrémonde is monstrous, but the Revolution that destroys him becomes monstrous in its own way. When you pick a quote, ask yourself whether it's critiquing one side or exposing a pattern. Most of the important ones do the second thing. If you're gathering these for a paper or a presentation, I'd suggest organizing them by theme rather than by chapter. The book is structured around parallel lives and mirrored characters. A quote about resurrection in Book One echoes a different kind of resurrection in Book Three. Cartons sacrifice aligns with Manette's recovery. The gaps between those moments are where the book's real argument lives. One more thing that tends to get missed. The opening paragraph has been reproduced so many times that it's lost some of its edge. Try reading the full paragraph without stopping. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..." It's not just contrast. It's an accelerando. By the fifth iteration you feel the anxiety building. Dickens is showing you how quickly opposition collapses into chaos. That rhythm matters. When you quote it, preserve the full sentence. Truncating it flattens the effect he's going for.

There's also a practical consideration I ran into during a thesis defense. Someone asked me why I kept coming back to Carton even though he barely appears in the first two books. My answer was simple. He's the structural keystone. The entire novel is built toward his choice. Every character's arc feeds into his moment at the end. Without him, it's just a period piece about the French Revolution with some nice prose. With him, it becomes something else entirely. If you want to go deeper, look at how Dickens handles silence. The novel is full of things characters don't say. Manette doesn't talk about his imprisonment for most of the book. Lucie barely speaks about her fears. The gaps between dialogue carry as much meaning as the dialogue itself. Some of the most important "quotes" are the ones Dickens deliberately withholds. The wine scene in Book One is another one worth sitting with. The old man breaks the barrel and everyone laps at the spilled wine like it's salvation. "Drunk on the blood of the dying." That image stays with you longer than any speech. It's not a quote in the traditional sense. It's a moment. But it functions the same way. It crystallizes the whole book's argument about how violence poisons everyone it touches, even the people who benefit from it momentarily.

I should mention that studying this book closely changes how you read almost everything else Dickens wrote. A Christmas Carol returns to the same economy of sacrifice. Great Expectations circles the same class resentment. Once you understand what Tale of Two Cities is doing with Carton's arc, you start seeing the pattern everywhere. That's actually the most useful takeaway you can get from working with these quotes. Not the quotes themselves, but what they reveal about how Dickens thinks about redemption and cost. When you're done with the book, most people forget about the framing device. Narrator keeps slipping in and out, sometimes commenting directly, sometimes vanishing. This isn't just stylistic showboating. It reminds you that you're reading a constructed story about history, not history itself. The quotes that survive longest are the ones that acknowledge this construction. The ones that pretend to speak directly from truth tend to feel hollow on reread. So here's what I'd actually recommend if you're putting together a collection. Start with Carton's final line. It's your thesis statement. Then move backward through the book, finding the moments that earned it. Manette's letter. Defarge's knitting. The wine street. The opening paragraph, read in full. Each one prepares the ground for the next. That's the order they should be in, even if it's not the order they appear in the novel. You'll see the architecture that way, and that's where the real understanding lives.