Vol. 06 · Misquoted ·Book ·157 of 348
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
They never said that.
What people say
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
What was actually said
"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…" Narrator — A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Why it stuck
The truncation keeps the rhetorical device but loses the scale. Dickens runs the antithesis out over ten paired clauses across a single 119-word sentence.
The full opening is often taught as one of the longest opening sentences in English fiction.
Know another line by heart?
Play the duel and see how many you can spot. Or browse the whole shelf.