Middle English Quotes

I was at the South-Eastern wall, and looking out through The Great Embrasure towards the Three Silver-fire Holes, that shone before the Thing That Nods, away down, far in the South-East. Southward of this, but nearer, there rose the vast bulk of the South-East Watcher - The Watching Thing of the South-East. And to the right and to the left of the squat monster burned the Torches; maybe half-a-mile upon each side; yet sufficient light they threw to show the lumbered-forward head of the never-sleeping Brute. ~ William Hope Hodgson

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in switch licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

In Middle English, a frankeleyn is a free man, an owner of land but not of title: neither a serf nor a peasant but not a nobleman, either. There ~ Jill Lepore

A dash derives from "to dash," to shatter, strike violently, to throw suddenly or violently, hence to throw carelessly in or on, hence to write carelessly or suddenly, to add or insert suddenly or carelessly to or in the page. "To dash" comes from Middle English daschen, itself probably from Scandinavian-compare Danish daske, to beat, to strike. Ultimately the word is-rather obviously-echoic. ~ Eric Partridge

Writers in what we now call the Middle English period (late twelfth century to 1485) did not necessarily always write in English. The language was in a state of flux: attempts were made to assert the French language, to keep down the local language, English, and to make the language of the church (Latin) the language of writing. ~ Ronald Carter

And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved. ~ William Hope Hodgson

In Middle English, cod meant "a bag or a sack", or by inference, "a scrotum", which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece. ~ Mark Kurlansky

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions. ~ Samantha Shannon

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world - indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states - the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

C'mon. I'll show you."
"Thou speakest strange!" Pearl said.
"So do thou!" I said.
"Thee!"
"Thou!" I said. ~ Eileen Favorite

We closed the deal and moved to New York.
Where in fact I had lived before, from the time I was twenty-one and just out of the English Department at Berkeley and starting work at Vogue (a segue so profoundly unnatural that when I was asked by the Condé Nast personnel department to name the languages in which I was fluent I could think only of Middle English) until I was twenty-nine and just married. ~ Joan Didion

For a moment it seemed that her impeccably impractical education - in which she'd learned about Middle English and Duchamp's urinal and sub-Saharan droughts but had never been taught how to apply for a credit card or answer an office phone - wasn't useless after all. ~ Ralph Sassone

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

And then, on the very borders of the Unknown Lands, there lay a range of low volcanoes, which lit up, far away in the outer darkness, the Black Hills, where shone the Seven Lights, which neither twinkled nor moved nor faltered through Eternity; and of which even the great spy-glass could make no understanding; nor had any adventurer from the Pyramid ever come back to tell us aught of them. And here let me say, that down in the Great Library of the Redoubt, were the histories of all those, with their discoveries, who had ventured out into the monstrousness of the Night Land, risking not the life only, but the spirit of life. ~ William Hope Hodgson

I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. "Which is all very well," she said bitterly, "but the only essay subject you can find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is 'How to Slaughter a Thousand Men in a Mead Hall'. ~ Helene Hanff

We plowed through Chaucer, and I learned to assist her using the Middle English dictionary. One year we spent the winter painstakingly noting each instance of symbolism within Pilgrim's Progress on separate recipe cards, and I was delighted to see our pile grow to be thicker than the book itself. She set her hair in curlers while listening to records of Carl Sandburg's poems over and over, and instructed me on how to hear the words differently each time. After discovering Susan Sontag, she explained to me that even meaning itself is a constructed concept, and I learned how to nod and pretend to understand. My ~ Hope Jahren

The firstdown team for this planet must have had a fixation on animals. Horse, Bear, Eagle. For three days we were creeping down the east coast of Equus over an irregular coastline called the Mane. We've spent the last day making the crossing of a short span of the Middle Sea to a large island called Cat Key. Today we are offloading passengers and freight at Felix, the "major city" of the island. ~ Dan Simmons

Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job. ~ Jeremy Piven

In most of the Western world, where Christianity still enjoys a significant amount of privilege, especially when practiced by middle-class, white Christians, Jesus is seen as the heroic figure, the ultimate example of godliness, holiness, mercy, compassion, and justice - as well he should! He is God-made-flesh, after all. However, given that, when we identify with Jesus in the act of foot washing where we take the role of Jesus, all too often we are unconsciously (though sometimes all too consciously) assuming those characteristics onto ourselves. In trying to be Jesus to others, we can assume a posture of spiritual superiority and/or paternalism. The recipients of our service, "the least of these", are then seen as the needy recipients of our goodness. Again, while affirming the value in such acts of humble service, too often miss how such posturing fails to recognize the radical presence of Christ as "the least of these". ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

When I look at my clothes, I think of them as an expression of the joy and fun of fashion - with a bit of English eccentricity thrown in. ~ Suzy Menkes

I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published. ~ Sally Kirkland

The philosophers must station themselves in the middle. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He may be dead; or he may be teaching English. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Nina pulled the pins from her hair, shucked off the blonde wig, and tossed it on the table they'd set in the middle of the tomb. She slumped into a chair, rubbing her fingers along her scalp. "So much better," she said with a happy sigh. But Matthias could not ignore the almost greenish cast to her skin.
She was worse tonight. Either she'd run into trouble with Smeet or she'd simply overexerted herself. And yet, watching her, Matthias felt something in him ease. At least now she looked like Nina again, her brown hair in damp tangles, her eyes half-shut. Was it normal to be fascinated by the way someone slouched? ~ Leigh Bardugo

When I was in middle school, I always did well in school, but teachers either loved me or absolutely hated me. ~ Miles Teller

The baby's eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she'd stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she'd washed up on. ~ Jenny Offill

The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich. ~ Robert Reich

America is really the only country strong enough to cope with the Russians these days, and we depend upon her support for much of our policy in Europe and the Middle East. They have just bought a monopoly oil concession in Saudi Arabia, and now they actually have more oil holdings in the Middle East than ourselves. That makes our role in Iran doubly important, because the Americans will try to pick up Middle East influence where we drop it. However, it is in our mutual interests to see that Russia is checked in the Middle East. We can always depend on American support for our case.' Essex laughed softly. 'In fact the Americans are more vigorous about the Russians than we are, because they are between the devil and our deep blue sea. ~ James Aldridge

The waitress serving the wedding party was a short young blonde. She took their orders efficiently and delivered everyone's food correctly. "If
only she knew my story," Melora mused. then she thought again, "Better yet,
maybe she's in the middle of her own story." Who knew what things might have
happened already on the island to this typical college-age waitress. ~ Marie Zhuikov

The first time my father woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me he was going to die, I think I was eight. He brought out all his papers and explained to me what to do with his body and who to call and how to take care of things. You either learn how to survive, or you fall to pieces. I'm pretty good at surviving. ~ Eric Walters

Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.' ~ Matthew Pearl

In the streets outside everything was still. The hour before five was the only time of day this city slept. In my earlier life, during the twelve years I had lived in Bergen I used to stay up at night as often as I could. I never reflected on this, it was just something I liked and did. It had started as a student ideal, grounded in a notion that in some way night was associated with freedom. Not in itself but as a response to the nine-to-four reality which I, and a couple of others, regarded as middle-class and conformist. We wanted to be free, we stayed up at night. Continuing with this had less to do with freedom than a growing need to be alone. This, I understood now, I shared with my father. In the house where we lived he had a whole studio apartment to himself and he spent more or less every evening there. The night was his. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

The next morning, I woke up to hear Becky moaning and rustling around in her bed covers.
"I'm so itchy!" she cried.
"So scratch!" I said, groggily, but suddenly, I felt itchy too.
So, I started scratching my legs. They felt better until I stopped scratching. Then, it started to burn. I threw back the covers and saw that my legs were covered in red bumps.
"My legs!" I yelled.
Becky looked over at me. Then, she pulled back her covers. Her legs were even worse. She gasped.
"Mom!" I cried.
Mom came in. She was ready for work, wearing her dress shirt and gym shorts. She only had to dress up the top half of her body in case she had to use her webcam to talk to her boss.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Look!" I said, showing her our legs.
"Oh no! That's poison ivy!" she cried, "Where were you guys playing yesterday?"
"The woods," I said.
"You must have been sitting in it," she said.

- The Castle Park Kids ~ Laura Smith

Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged. ~ Rupert Sheldrake

If you do not get to her time...............He will cut out her heart & feed it to the fishes...." Alice ~ Kathy Cyr

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music. ~ John R. Rickford

What is Logicke but the highe waie to wrangling, contayning in it a world of bibble babble. Need we anie of your Greek, Latine, Hebrue, or anie such gibbrage, when we have the word of God in English? ~ Thomas Nashe

People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value - the yarn or the teacups or the books - and with the idea only of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else - a refuge and a justification. ~ Alice Munro

The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it. ~ Karen Russell

Obtaining sought skills is critical in gaining an advantage over others (competitors), but being fluent in English could enable you to leap into the next level of success in international business. ~ John Taskinsoy

Shorn of unattractive language about "robots" who will be producing taxes and not burglarizing homes, the general idea that schools in ghettoized communities must settle for a different set of goals than schools that serve the children of the middle class and upper middle class has been accepted widely. And much of the rhetoric of "rigor" and "high standards" that we hear so frequently, no matter how egalitarian in spirit it may sound to some, is fatally belied by practices that vulgarize the intellects of children and take from their education far too many of the opportunities for cultural and critical reflectiveness without which citizens become receptacles for other people's ideologies and ways of looking at the world but lack the independent spirits to create their own. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The media like a good fight. They pick out the extremes and they leave out all the people in the middle who believe in both God and evolution. ~ Ian Barbour

The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep. ~ Michel Foucault

We always say Jordan is not rich in natural resources - we don't have oil or gas like some of our neighbors do - but I think in terms of human resources, we are quite lucky and we are really trying to foster an environment of innovation and technology. I think Jordan will emerge as a center of innovation in the Middle East. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

Does it scare you?" said Clare. "Living in a house with guns?"
Hunter smiled. "It's not like I wake up in the middle of the night to find them staring down at me."
"Shut up." She gave him a light shove. "No, I mean, are you ever worried you'll accidentally get shot?"
"You mean, when I catch the assault rifle raiding the refrigerator? Like maybe it'll turn on me?"
Her breath caught again. "You have an assault rifle in your house?"
"Sure. It's partial to lime Jell-O. ~ Brigid Kemmerer

Addiction is a tunnel that wakes you up in the middle of the night. Everything else happens out here in the light. ~ Cheryl Strayed

The ideological fantasies of this movement [New Left of the 1960s] … were no more than a nonsensical expression of the whims of spoilt middle-class children, and while the extremists among them were virtually indistinguishable from Fascist thugs, the movement did without doubt express a profound crisis of faith in the values that had inspired democratic societies for many decades.… The New Left explosion of academic youth was an aggressive movement born of frustration, which easily created a vocabulary for itself out of Marxist slogans … : liberation, revolution, alienation, etc. Apart from this, its ideology really has little in common with Marxism. It consists of "revolution" without the working class; hatred of modern technology as such; …the cult of primitive societies … as the source of progress; hatred of education and specialized knowledge. ~ Leszek Kołakowski

We have many obligations to this good lady, who is a kind neighbour, an obliging friend, and a most agreeable companion: she speaks English prettily, and is greatly attached to the people and the customs of our nation. They ~ Tobias Smollett

And he was probably right. Unless Hills Village Middle School had a witness protection program, I was dead meat. Man, I hated Miller. ~ James Patterson

A person like myself, born and raised in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, to lower-middle-class parents. But I had the opportunity to get an education, to go and earn a commission in the United States Army, to serve for 22 years, to lead men and women in combat. ~ Allen West

I had to do this very aggressive, big score in a very short time, and knowing that in the beginning, middle, and end would be this very, very famous theme, but I still had to weave a score around it and make it work as a score was really challenging. ~ Danny Elfman

Why should we care about the coup? First, because we depend on Yemen's government to support our drone war against another local menace, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). It's not clear if we can even maintain our embassy in Yemen, let alone conduct operations against AQAP. And second, because growing Iranian hegemony is a mortal threat to our allies and interests in the entire Middle East. ~ Charles Krauthammer

The idea that modern labour has an ascetic character is of course not new. Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other to-day. This fundamentally ascetic trait of middle-class life, if it attempts to be a way of life at all, and not simply the absence of any, was what Goethe wanted to teach, at the height of his wisdom, in the Wanderjahren, and in the end which he gave to the life of his Faust. For him the realization meant a renunciation, a departure from an age of full and beautiful humanity, which can no more be repeated in the course of our cultural development than can the flower of the Athenian culture of antiquity. ~ Max Weber

The world is an illusion. Why is it unreal? Because none of the knowledge is going to remain permanent, as real knowledge. I had a number of identities; I was a child, I was a boy, I was a teenager, I was a middle-aged man, I was an old man. Like other identities I thought would remain constant, they never remained so. Finally, I became very old ... So which identity remained honest with me? ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them. ~ Winston Churchill

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In English, we don't have a word for people who aren't virgins. What the non-virgin lexical gap really made me think was that our obsession with sexual purity is such that once you are no longer this THING, you are indescribable. ~ John Green

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known. ~ David Crystal