Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb was an English poet, playwright, literary critic, and children's writer born in London on 10 February 1775.
Educated at Christ's Hospital, Lamb went on to work across several distinct literary forms throughout his life as a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He wrote poetry, produced plays, engaged in literary criticism, and also wrote for younger readers — a range of output that resists easy categorisation under any single label. His working language throughout was English, and his career spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Tales from Shakespeare is a notable work associated with his name, representing the side of his output directed at children and sitting alongside the poetry, drama, and criticism that made up the rest of his career. That combination of children's writing with literary criticism and verse is one of the more distinctive features of what he left behind. Lamb died on 27 December 1834 in Edmonton, having been born in London nearly sixty years before.
Quotes by Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb's insights on:
A breakfast, merits; ever giving / Cheerful notice we are living / Another day refreshed by sleep, / When its festival we keep.
No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.
Anger in its time and place / May assume a kind of grace. / It must have some reason in it / And not last beyond a minute.
I have had playmates, I have had companions, / In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,— / All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and to have it found out by accident.
Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
Did I hear the church-clock a few minutes ago, I was asked, and I answered, I hardly did know,but I thought that I heard it strike three.
Ceremony is an invention to take off the uneasy feeling which we derive from knowing ourselves to be less the object of love and esteem with a fellow creature than some other person is. It endeavours to make up, by superior attentions in little points, for that invidious preference which it is forced to deny in the greater.