“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
Context
The closing lines of the novel. Sydney Carton, a dissipated lawyer who has secretly taken the place of the condemned Charles Darnay at the guillotine so that Lucie Manette may keep her husband, mounts the scaffold during the Terror. The narrator frames these as the prophetic words Carton would have spoken had he given his final thoughts utterance.
How the repetition works
The doubled adjective “far, far” shows epizeuxis intensifying an ordinary modifier rather than venting an exclamatory cry — the repetition turns a plain comparative (“better”) into something absolute. Dickens then deploys the same figure twice in balanced clauses (“far, far better thing… far, far better rest”), so the repetition operates at two scales at once: within the phrase and across the sentence's symmetry, lending the line its valedictory cadence.