457 Quotes About Shakespeare

Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare

He did recall that the summer after graduating from college before he joined the state police he had read Shakespeare. It was the pure language that stupefied him. He would be in a diner reading A Midsummer Night's Dream and his acquaintances were confident he was studying for some test. The test turned out to be the nature of his mind. Shakespeare seemed even truer than history. Literature was against the abyss while history wallowed in it.

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}

What do you do when the alienating silence deafens your 'bootless cries'?

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

... به همین خاطر است که جان من پیوسته به سوی عهد عتیق و شکسپیر باز می گردد: آن جا حداقل احساس می کنی که موجودی انسانی سخن می گوید؛ آن جا مردم نفرت می ورزند، عشق می ورزند، مردم دشمنانشان را به قتل می رسانند و فرزندانشان را نسل بعد از نسل نفرین می کنند؛ آن جا مردم گناه می کنند.