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.
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段澄依
Dickens's opening speech in a tale of two cities can be called a classic. This passage uses parallelism and antithesis. The sentences are neat and the words are concise in place. It achieves a high degree of generalization through the opposition of words and sentences, and vividly describes the contradictions of the society at that time and the views of different people on the society.