The longer I lived, the longer it would be until I saw him alive again, until I could taste his new lips and run my fingers through his new hair. We could be young and beautiful again . . .
He would reach for me in the middle of the night, nearly every single night, wrapping one of those solid arms around my waist and pulling me in close. So. Close.
He made me feel unhinged . . . like he could take me apart and put me back together again and again.
I don't think that science and the paranormal have to be at war; in fact, it's crucial that they work together. It seems naïve to believe that the world is exactly as it seems.
When we can't understand the science behind something in this world, we make up mythological entities that we can relate to. We personify the forces of nature that mystify us, using our boundless imaginations to comfort us and make us feel like we have some control over these things that are much bigger than we are.
I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled.
Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvases. These are the children of the gods.
O serpent heart hid with a flowering face!
Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave?
Beautiful tyrant, feind angelical, dove feather raven, wolvish-ravening lamb! Despised substance of devinest show, just opposite to what thou justly seemest - A dammed saint, an honourable villain!
Sometimes...the hardest part about letting someone go is realizing that you were never meant to have them.
What's in a name, anyway? That which we call a nose by any other name would still smell.
It was one of those cases where you approve the broad, general principle of an idea but can't help being in a bit of a twitter at the prospect of putting it into practical effect. I explained this to Jeeves, and he said much the same thing had bothered Hamlet.
But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?
We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.
He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’
‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.
‘Quite so…
She captured the spot of my world’s centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.
All is as if the world did cease to exist. The city's monuments go unseen, its past unheard, and its culture slowly fading in the dismal sea.
For thy sweet love remembr'd such wealth brings
That then, I scorn to change my state with kings.
Shakespeare’s enduring tragedy did its part to further the goals of the Mercenaries - glamorizing death, making dying for love seem the most noble act of all, though nothing could be further from the truth. Taking an innocent life - in a misguided attempt to prove love or for any other reason - is a useless waste.
They died together; they'll always be remembered together. It's decided, once and for all. He was hers.
I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
You and those shot-glass eyes, deep swirling pools of 80-proof firewater, with the depth and profundity of Saturn’s spinning pulsars…
I quickly learned, however, that a university education is not a prerequisite to reading Shakespeare. After all, his original audience was not college-educated. Neither was he.
The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.
What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?
I have good reason to be content,
for thank God I can read and
perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
Shakespeare had all these sonnets where what he said came down to this: Youth is fleeting and you'd better get married and have children and make a copy of the beauty you own because the world owns it too.
Do we not each dream of dreams? Do we not dance on the notes of lost
memories? Then are we not each dreamers of tomorrow and yesterday, since dreams
play when time is askew? Are we not all adrift in the constant sea of trial and when all is done, do we not all yearn for ships to carry us home?
I can’t help but ask, “Do you know where you are?”
She turns to me with a foreboding glare. “Do you?
There is a stillness between us, a period of restlessness that ties my stomach
in a hangman’s noose. It is this same lack in noise that lives, there! in the
darkness of the grave, how it frightens me beyond all things.
History doesn’t start with a tall building
and a card with your name written on it, but jokes do. I think someone is taking
us for suckers and is playing a mean game.
She leaves my side and heads deeper into
the apartment singing, “ - if the spirit tries to hide, its temple far away… a
copper for those they ask, a diamond for those who stay.
That’s a stupid name! Whirly-gig is much better, I think. Who in their right
mind would point at this thing and say, ‘I’m going to fly in my Model-A1’.
People would much rather say, ‘Get in my whirly-gig’. And that’s what you
should name it.
I rouse Emily to our guests, as she finishes off our fifteenth snowman by setting the head atop its torso. She stands limp at my direction, pointing out the coming shadows and I cannot help but hear a muffled sigh as she decapitates her latest creation with a single push of her hand.
Shakespeare, in some sense, helped create the modern man, didn't he, his influence is that pervasive. He held the mirror up to nature, but he also created that mirror: so the image he created is the very one we hold ourselves up to.
He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.
Lucentio: I read that I profess, the Art of Love.
Bianca: And may you prove, sir, master of your art!
Lucentio: While you, sweet dear, prove mistress of my heart!
Ah youth, youth! That's what happens when you go steeping your soul into Shakespeare
The time approaches
That will with due decision make us know
What we shall say we have and what we owe.
Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate,
But certain issue strokes must arbitrate;
Towards which, advance the war.
They exit marching.
Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, 'O, teach me how I should forget to think!' I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.
Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not.
Since Shakespeare had a feel for revolutionary rhetoric, let’s all cry: “Peace, freedom and liberty!
From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty
As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope of the immoderate use
Turns to restraint. Our natures do pursue, -
Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, -
A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.
I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.
The life of Shakespeare is a fine mystery and I tremble every day lest something turn up.
I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.
I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.
You don't know yet what money is. Money is power, when you have lived as long as I have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say? Put money in thy purse.
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder that such trivial people should muse and thunder in such lovely language.
It was wonderful flirting with him, all the razor-edged literary banter, like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. A battle of wit, and a test, too.
Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?
Do not speak unflatteringly of Jane," Flora said, walking beside Chad. "She is the greatest writer to have ever lived." "I thought that was Shakespeare." "William was, or course, quite good," Flora said. "But no one can compare to Jane Austen.
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.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
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