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 was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Opening sentence, Chapter I
The twelve words everybody quotes are the first twelve of this one sentence.
✓Public domain
A Tale of Two Cities was first published in 1859 — serially in All the Year Round from 30 April, then as a Chapman & Hall book the same year — and Dickens died in 1870. The work is long out of copyright in the United States, and the sentence may be quoted freely. Modern annotated editions can carry their own copyright in the editor’s notes and introduction, but not in Dickens’s text.
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