Prospero Quotes

Come, thou tortoise! ~ William Shakespeare

The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl. ~ Erin Morgenstern

He selected one of these incantations and began to chant in a loud, wailing voice. All the clocks in the house suddenly went off at once, though it was only three-twenty; the copper pots hanging in the kitchen clanged and whanged against each other; and a couple of the wizard's books fell off their shelves with a clump. But nothing else happened. Prospero slammed the magic book shut and slumped into an overstuffed chair. He fumbled in his smoking stand for his pipe and tobacco. "I learned that spell fifty years ago," he mumbled as he lit his pipe. "And I still don't know what it's for. ~ John Bellairs

Then to the elements be free... ~ William Shakespeare

We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. - PROSPERO, THE TEMPEST, ACT IV, SCENE 1 ~ Erin Morgenstern

Suffice it to say I was compelled to create this group in order to find everyone who is, let's say, borrowing liberally from my INESTIMABLE FOLIO OF CANONICAL MASTERPIECES (sorry, I just do that sometimes), and get you all together. It's the least I could do.

I mean, seriously. Those soliloquies in Moby-Dick? Sooo Hamlet and/or Othello, with maybe a little Shylock thrown in. Everyone from Pip in Great Expectations to freakin' Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre mentions my plays, sometimes completely mangling my words in nineteenth-century middle-American dialect for humorous effect (thank you, Sir Clemens). Many people (cough Virginia Woolf cough) just quote me over and over again without attribution. I hear James Joyce even devoted a chapter of his giant novel to something called the "Hamlet theory," though do you have some sort of newfangled English? It looks like gobbledygook to me. The only people who don't seek me out are like Chaucer and Dante and those ancient Greeks. For whatever reason.

And then there are the titles. The Sound and the Fury? Mine. Infinite Jest? Mine. Proust, Nabokov, Steinbeck, and Agatha Christie all have titles that are me-inspired. Brave New World? Not just the title, but half the plot has to do with my work. Even Edgar Allan Poe named a character after my Tempest's Prospero (though, not surprisingly, things didn't turn out well for him!). I'm like the star to every wandering bark, the arrow of every compass, the buzzard to every haw ~ Sarah Schmelling

Thou most lying slave,
Whom stripes may move, not kindness! ~ William Shakespeare

I fished inside my head for something, some way to prove it. And those strange words floated to the surface of my need. In as clear a
voice as l could, l looked at Prospero and said, "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. ~ Jonathan Maberry

Without a Prospero-Caliban relationship to balance the Prospero-Ariel one, 'The Tempest' loses much of its resonance. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Prospero the Enchanter's immediate reaction upon meeting his daughter is a simple declaration of: Well, fuck. ~ Erin Morgenstern

How wide the gulf between Henry as he was and Henry as Helen thought he ought to be! And she herself - hovering as usual between the two, now accepting men as they are, now yearning with her sister for Truth. Love and Truth - their warfare seems eternal. Perhaps the whole visible world rests on it, and if they were one, life itself, like the spirits when Prospero was reconciled to his brother, might vanish into air, into thin air. ~ E.M. Forster

Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(Lied about the world, lied about me)
That you have ended by imposing on me
An image of myself.
Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That s the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
And I know myself as well. ~ Aime Cesaire

Prospero wanted to drowm his book.
I just threw mine across the room and jumped on it a couple of times. ~ John Beamish

Sometimes, of course, the artist does give up, saying, in effect, "I've done enough". Prospero declares that the revels are ended, and breaks his staff - his author retires to Stratford. At the very end, Mann did something similar. Interestingly, in both instances, death came quite quickly after that. ~ Philip Kitcher

It would be like Prospero's island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician's land. ~ Lev Grossman

Thou poisonous slave, got by the devil himself
Upon thy wicked dam ~ William Shakespeare

I do not think, Prospero,' he said, 'that one should attribute a very high degree of reality to your house. ~ John Bellairs