Medieval Literature Quotes

I used to be in school, like a good boy. Medieval Literature. Von Eschenbach, Chaucer, Milton... Yes, sir, no, sir. Then I had that... Crisis. You know it? Wake up one morning and everything's all wrong? Wake up one morning and it occurs to you the milk's spoiled and the bread is getting moldy. Wake up and it just hits you. Someday you're gonna die. Maybe like that girl last night died. Face down in an alley with a caved in head. Such a terrible thing and what for? Why life? Why This life? Why This soap? Why these hands? What's it all mean? Deep down you fear nothing. But you still hope something. Either way, you're not really sure. That's my crisis. I don't wanna die. But if I'm gonna die, first I'm gonna live. I'm gonna peel life like fruit, and use it up. I'm gonna light up an' burn. I'll burn and burn until I'm snuffed out. Then I'll just fade away. But until then I'm gonna live! I'm ready. I'm gonna do it. Come what may, one hundred percent. ~ Paul Pope

George is a goblin who looks like a young boy. He is explaining to his friend Lout, an ogre, that he's really older than he seems - - -

"My people grow slowly and I've been around longer than you think. I'm very mature for my age. I have a doctorate degree from Oxford in Medieval Literature," said George.

"Is Oxford really in this story?" asked Lout.

"I should have said Oxxphord."

"That sounds better. I'm really impressed, George. With an education like that, you could get a great job."

"Yeah, that's how I ended up as a stable boy. ~ Bob Craton

The 'most precious object of the Western world' is now a national monument of Ireland at the very highest level. It is probably the most famous and perhaps the most emotively charged medieval book of any kind. It is the iconic symbol of Irish culture. It is included in the Memory of the World Register compiled by UNESCO. A design echoing the Book of Kells was used on the former penny coin of Ireland (1971 to 2000) and on a commemorative twenty-euro piece in 2012. One of its initials was shown on the reverse of the old Irish five-pound banknote. It has been illustrated on the country's postage stamps. Probably every Irish bar in the world has some reflexion of its script or decoration. ~ Christopher De Hamel

I've always like Medieval literature. As a young girl I read mythologies and Norse legends, that sort of thing. I loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While I was studying at Middle Tennessee State University for doctoral program I came in contact with more ancient literature. I examined older literature more seriously which intrigued and fascinated me very much; I was drawn to it.
For the book I used all my own translations of Beowulf from my doctorate. Culture is contained in language, if you study a language you'll see bits of culture, because the words are different and you see into the lives of the people. The Anglo-Saxon language touched me very deeply. Some of it is the heroic. Some of it is the melancholy. But there is also honor. You uphold, you fight to the death. Even if you watch movies, like Marvel comic book movies, like Thor: you want the great ones to win. Its even better if they have a fault. But you want the heroic character to win. ~ Deborah A. Higgens

There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Will they not for their part have monkeys and marmosets to make them fine coats and doublets of leather and iron? Hands would not be a problem, for the monkeys could work with their hands, and so they would in no way be inferior to man; they could even be writers. They would never be so feeble as not to put their heads together to find ways of resisting these arms, and they would construct machines of their own with which they would inflict great harm on men. ~ Jean De Meun

The tall, thin serious man strode in, his dark cloak billowing so dramatically it threatened to extinguish the lamp flame with its draught. He advanced like a malevolent shadow consuming the dim orange light, filling the room with a presence almost more than human. ~ Gregory Figg

Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us. ~ Christopher De Hamel

His spirit chaunged house and wente ther,
As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

I have a master's degree in medieval literature. Wyverns - or firedrakes, if you prefer - were once common in European mythology and legends." "But you . . . you're my accountant," Sarah sputtered. "Do you have any idea how many English majors are accountants?" Vivian asked with raised eyebrows. ~ Deborah Harkness

...for most men are unaware that what is in the power of magicians to accomplish, that the heart can also accomplish by dint of love and bravery. ~ Joseph Bedier

Amor, ch'al cor gentile ratto s'apprende
prese costui de la bella persona
che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende.

Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona..."

"Love, which quickly arrests the gentle heart,
Seized him with my beautiful form
That was taken from me, in a manner which still grieves me.

Love, which pardons no beloved from loving,
took me so strongly with delight in him
That, as you see, it still abandons me not... ~ Dante Alighieri

Little son, I have longed a while to see you, and now I see you the fairest thing ever a woman bore. In sadness came I hither, in sadness did I bring forth, and in sadness has your first feast day gone. And as by sadness you came into the world, your name shall be called Tristan; that is the child of sadness."

After she had said these words she kissed him, and immediately when she had kissed him she died. ~ Joseph Bedier

And it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

Protect our children from failure, is impossible; Teach them how to get up can make the difference ~ Mayra A. Diaz

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading. ~ Elizabeth Olsen

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays. ~ Karl Kraus

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd. ~ Philip Larkin

Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever. ~ Alison Winfield Burns

..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get. ~ Meraaqi

There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock. ~ Angela Carter

To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems. ~ Wallace Stevens

Literature has become merely a tool for culture studies. ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters. ~ Honore De Balzac

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact. ~ Robert Galbraith

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation. ~ Paul Valery

It is not surprising, then, that in the decade since Oslo began, Arafat used all the resources placed at his disposal to fan the flames of hatred against Israel. ~ Natan Sharansky

Our sexual fantasies are often redundant and intense, like many other ideas involving ourselves. Most people approach sexuality limited to the idea that they should imitate other people, art (e.g., romantic literature) or movies (e.g., pornography). In this way, vicarious events and even fictions become a point of reference that we can actually feel. We judge actual people in our real lives against fictional events and unrealistic concepts. As such, real lovers seem inferior as a result. ~ Todd Vickers

Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates? ~ Maria Popova

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several ideas with action or inaction respectively. ~ William James

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it. ~ Gertrude Stein

I try to give people hope. Even though life is bleak, there's hope out there. ~ Danielle Steel

Nothing good ever comes of violence. ~ Martin Luther

Say, you told me you thought Les Miserables was the greatest novel ever written. I think Vanity Fair is the greatest. Let's fight. - Joe Willard ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

Wriggling around, two fingers deep in my back end like some teenage boy unsure what he should be tugging at inside his girlfriend's nether region I wrestled a fifty free. ~ David Louden

I would have thought," said the prime minister, "that Your Majesty was above literature."
"Above literature?" said the Queen. "Who is above literature? You might as well say one is above humanity. ~ Alan Bennett

Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language. ~ Lev Grossman

But even now, with the crates piled high in the hall, what I see most plainly about the books is that they are beautiful. They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight - matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one's own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. ~ Leon Wieseltier

It is not good to have a rule of many. ~ Homer

No, Margaret Atwood writes literature, whereas I write fiction. I'm from the American Midwest, so literature is beyond my abilities. ~ Stella Atrium

so that it isn't upsetting to anybody. It's something we've always known about fairy tales – they talk about incest, the Oedipus complex, about psychotic mothers, like those of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, who throw their children out. They tell things about life which children know instinctively, and the pleasure and relief lie in finding these things expressed in language that children can live with. You can't eradicate these feelings – they exist and they're a great source of creative inspiration. ~ Maurice Sendak

The love I knew was from books.. ~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation. ~ Jeanette Winterson

In this,
journey,
of reaching,
to myself,
I have had,
many a,
thoroughfares,
goodbye affairs,
reality checks,
and,
lovely overwhelms. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature ... Never again another seven-volume saga. ~ George R R Martin

People don't read to enlighten themselves or seek to gain some valuable insight into their own psychology. People read to escape. ~ Dermot Davis

As for our garments, my Mother did not only delight to see us neat and cleanly, fine and gay, but rich and costly: maintaining us to the heighth of her estate, but not beyond it. ~ Margaret Cavendish

How was she created? I'm not sure if you realize this, but it was in God's image. How can anybody dare to speak ill of something which bears such a noble imprint? ~ Christine De Pizan

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex. ~ Norman MacCaig

I have been asked to explain what I meant by saying that "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." I have no notion when I said it or where I said it, or even whether I said it; in the sense that I do not now remember ever saying it at all. But I do know why I said it; if I ever said it at all. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Modern writers are the moons of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the ancients. ~ Samuel Johnson

More gold has been mined from the thoughts of men than has been taken from the earth. ~ Napoleon Hill

The short story, its course plotted and its form proscribed, has become too efficient ... but efficiency is not the most, it is perhaps the least, important among the undoubted elements of good literature ~ Henry Seidel Canby

I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group. ~ Anne Rice

If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level. ~ Richard Carmona

Virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower. ~ Karl Kraus