English essayist and critic (1775-1834)
It is with some violation of the imagination that we conceive of an actor belonging to the relations of private life, so closely do we identify these persons in our mind with the characters which they assume upon the stage.
CHARLES LAMB
attributed, Day's Collacon
Clap an extinguisher on your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
CHARLES LAMB
A Complete Elia
The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy, who can be dull in Fleet Street.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Thomas Manning, Feb. 15, 1802
Dream not ... of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jun. 10, 1796
I grow ominously tired of official confinement. Thirty years have I served the Philistines, and my neck is not subdued to the yoke. You don't know how wearisome it is to breathe the air of four pent walls without relief day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four without ease or interposition ... these pestilential clerk-faces always in one's dish. O for a few years between the grave and the desk!
CHARLES LAMB
letter to William Wordsworth, Mar. 20, 1822
I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to John Chambers, 1817
A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.
CHARLES LAMB
letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oct. 11, 1802