"Micawber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... judge a man's whole intellectual character, and declare him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about matters of business. Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,— pursued by the distraint of one of the friendly family of Quiney— Adrian Quiney. They were neighbours and made a common dunghill ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... always coming down on the church for contributions, and holding fairs in summer, and tableaux and what not, in winter, and generally waiting for something to turn up. If I had the naming of this church I would call it St. Micawber's church." ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... difference which existed around him—and which no one else had seemed to notice—that the possession of more or fewer pieces of money made between human beings otherwise equal. He had a democratic philosophy which is sometimes that of Mr. Micawber, "Celui-la est riche qui recoit plus qu'il ne consume; celui-la est pauvre dont la depense excede la recette," But he is seldom so prosy as this. Let us think of him as one who wished to turn his talent as a painter of still life to the benefit of his nation, and who succeeded in a degree far ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... shall I end the sentence? Why, thus, if you please,—that it seems to me as if I ought to be there six months of the year, and that somebody ought to want me to do something that would bring me there. But somebody,—who is that? Why, nobody. You can't see him; you can't find him; Micawber never caught him, though he was hunting for him all his life,—always hoped the creature would turn up, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... at night. He has time to see everyone who would see him; for he can never tell when "the man with the idea" will knock at his door. Unlike the British naval officer charged with the duty of examining inventions to win the War, who is described by Guedalla as sitting like an inverted Micawber "waiting for something to turn down," he is waiting for something to turn up. He does more than wait; he works twenty hours a day ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... the public world.' They are people who are natural—natural in a sense that the holders of high office never can be. Dickens could only write of natural people, so he wrote of common men: 'You will find him adrift as an impecunious commercial traveller like Micawber; you will find him but one of a batch of silly clerks like Swiveller; you will find him as an unsuccessful actor like Crumples; you will find him as an unsuccessful doctor like Sawyer; you will always find the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... bust of me; and though it always makes me laugh to think of having a new likeness, considering the melancholy results of all former enterprises, yet still I find myself easy to be entreated, in hopes, as Mr. Micawber says, that something may "turn up," though I fear the difficulty is radical in the subject. So I made an appointment with Mr. Burnard, and my very kind friend, Mr. B., in addition to all the other ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... in any real and earnest manner, attempted to solve the problem of rural school supervision. They have merely let things drift along as they would, not fully realizing the problem or else trusting to time to come to their aid. Micawber-like, they are waiting for "something to turn up." But such problems will ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... GAMEKEEPER, - Your p. c. (proving you a good student of Micawber) has just arrived, and it paves the way to something I am anxious to say. I wrote a paper the other day - PULVIS ET UMBRA; - I wrote it with great feeling and conviction: to me it seemed bracing and healthful, it is in such a world ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are recognized by their emblems. Why should not the sinners have the same means of identification? Dickens has the courage to furnish us these necessary aids to recollection. Micawber, Mrs. Gummidge, Barkis, Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep, Betsy Trotwood, Dick Swiveiler, Mr. Mantalini, Harold Skimpole, Sairey Gamp, always appear with their appropriate insignia. We should remember that it is ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... and waited. Still there was no action on the part of the Greasers. They appeared content to wait for something to "turn up," as Mr. Micawber would say. ...
— The Boy Ranchers at Spur Creek - or Fighting the Sheep Herders • Willard F. Baker
... follow his habit of former days, and to cook only twice a week. In fact, they were evidently passing through one of those monetary crises to which we become used when reading the annals of the Balzacs, and which irresistibly remind the reader of similar affairs in the Micawber family. ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Micawber l'arrive de David dans la maison. Elie tait bien loin de se douter, avant son mariage, qu'il lui faudrait jamais prendre un locataire, mais que faire dans sa position? Et elle lui explique les difficults ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... achievement lay in the number of his creations, and in the distinctness with which he could impress them on the memory of his readers. Of the great host of figures who throng his scenes, how many we remember! Their names remain stamped on our minds, and some of their characteristic phrases, like Micawber's "Something will turn up," or Tapley's "There's some credit in being jolly here," have passed into current phrases. Dickens' great object was to celebrate the virtues of the humbler ranks of life, and to expose the acts of injustice or tyranny to which they are subjected. This he did in a spirit ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Thackeray got a general hearing Dickens had fame and mighty influence. It was in the eighteen thirties that the self-made son of an impecunious navy clerk, who did not live in vain since he sat for a portrait of Micawber and the father of the Marshalsea, turned from journalism to that higher reporting which means the fiction of manners and humors. All the gods had prepared him for his destiny. Sympathy he had for the ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... objections to soap, brought us our beer, and then we looked around. There was music, not very good, only a few people smoking china pipes and not even drinking beer, a few idly reading the paper, and a general air over everybody of Mr. Micawber waiting ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... alluding to some newspaper editor or Senator or homicidal rowdy by one of these three names. I never met any one exactly like Uriah Heep, but now and then we see individuals show traits which make it easy to describe them, with reference to those traits, as Uriah Heep. It is just the same with Micawber. Mrs. Nickleby is not quite a real person, but she typifies, in accentuated form, traits which a great many real persons possess, and I am continually thinking of her when I meet them. There are half a dozen books of Dickens which have, I think, furnished more characters which are the constant ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... spread is the human conviction that, failing all else, any one can "write for the papers," making a lucrative living on easy terms, amid agreeable circumstances. I have often wondered how Dickens, familiar as he was with this frailty, did not make use of it in the closing epoch of Micawber's life before he quitted England. Knowing what he did, as letters coming to light at this day testify, it would seem to be the most natural thing in the world that finally, nothing else having turned up, it should occur to Dickens that Mr. Micawber ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... the nardoo alone. Nothing now but the greatest good luck can save any of us; and as for myself I may live four or five days if the weather continues warm. My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr. Micawber, 'for SOMETHING TO TURN up;' starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move one's self; for as far as appetite is concerned, ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... club-house window. Tigg Montague's cab dashed by them in Regent Street, more gorgeous than ever. The brothers Cheeryble went trotting cityward arm in arm, with a smile and ha'penny for all the beggars they met; and the Micawber family passed them in a bus, going, I suppose, to accompany ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott |
