The Hamlet Quotes

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov

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

Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters, it was its own horror movie monster, smashing me under its foot. I had failed and the Auteur would make The Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naïveté in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it. Hollywood was much more efficient, imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps hi ~ Oscar Wilde

Ab figured that the chance of his recognising it would be about the same as a burglar recognising a dollar watch that happened to get caught for a minute on his vest button five years ago ~ William Faulkner

Other sounds woke the hamlet: the blast of a ship's foghorn blown at the pit top to mark the start of the shift; the echo of others - 'buzzers', as they were called - from the pits in the valley below. For the deep sleepers, there was the 'knocker-up'; a human alarm clock, he used a long pole to rattle the window panes of the households that paid him a few pennies each week. ~ Catherine Bailey

You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop. ~ Derek Jacobi

Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village-green, With magic tints to harmonize the scene. Stilled is the hum that through the hamlet broke When round the ruins of their ancient oak The peasants flocked to hear the minstrel play, And games and carols closed the busy day. ~ Samuel Rogers

Over To Candleford
Chapter XXVIII: Growing Pains
"This accumulated depression of months slid from her at last in a moment. She had
run out into the fields one day in a pet and was standing on a small stone bridge looking down on brown running water flecked with cream-coloured foam. It was a dull November day with grey sky and mist. The little brook was scarcely more than a trench to drain the fields; but overhanging it were thorn bushes with a lacework of leafless twigs; ivy had sent trails down the steep banks to dip in the stream, and from every thorn on the leafless twigs and from every point of the ivy leaves water hung in bright drops, like beads.

A flock of starlings had whirred up from the bushes at her approach and the clip, clop of a cart-horse's hoofs could be heard on the nearest road, but these were the only sounds. Of the hamlet, only a few hundred yards away, she could hear no sound, or see as much as a chimney-pot, walled in as she was by the mist.
Laura looked and looked again. The small scene, so commonplace and yet so lovely, delighted her."
It was so near the homes
men and yet so far removed from their thoughts. The fresh green moss, the glistening ivy, and the reddish twigs with their sparkling drops seemed to have been made for her alone and the hurrying, foam-flecked water seemed to have some message for her. She felt suddenly uplifted. The things which had troubled her troubled her no more. She did not reason. ~ Flora Thompson

Each in his narrow cell forever laid, The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. ~ Thomas Gray

Visually speaking, nothing calls Shakespeare to mind like Hamlet holding Yorick's skull. ~ Ian Doescher

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unused. ~ William Shakespeare

Critchley and Webster's fierce, witty exploration of Hamlet makes most other writing about Shakespeare seem simpleminded. ~ Hari Kunzru

Pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts. ~ William Shakespeare

God didn't create us with such a huge power of thought and a divine capacity for reason in order for us not to use them, ~ Hamlet Shakespeare

Five billion people have played Hamlet. 'To be or not to be.' And how do you do that and find your way into your own journey, your own way of telling it? ~ Annette Bening

To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. ~ J.B. Priestley

Most people don't see Hamlet as an old bald guy. ~ Joss Whedon

To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters. ~ Ernst F. Schumacher

My Hamlet was about as alienated as you can get. Mine was a bitter and lonely prince. Valid, I think, but maybe tough to root for. I think that romance was missing. ~ Stephen Lang

I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure. ~ Kenneth Branagh

I turned Hamlet down because it was going to take up too much of my drinking time. ~ Richard Harris

I have an aunt who believed strongly that teaching kids that Shakespeare is 'hard' is wrong, so she handed me 'Hamlet' when I was in kindergarten to see what would happen. What happened was I did a book report on 'Hamlet' and caused quite a lot of trouble! ~ Seanan McGuire

There is good weird and good strange and bad weird and bad strange. Your Daddy is good weird and good strange. ~ Roger Hamlet

Doing nothing was as honourable as any available course of action. Think of Hamlet, think of Job, think of Jesus before Pilate. ~ Johnny Rich

In a hamlet of ten households, there are bound to be those who are my equal in doing their best for others and in being trustworthy in what they say, but they are unlikely to be as eager to learn as I am. ~ Confucius

To sleep perchance to dream ~ William Shakespeare

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? Ophelia: No, my lord. Hamlet: DId you think I meant country matters? Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord. Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. Ophelia: What is, my lord? Hamlet: Nothing. ~ William Shakespeare

I had written about a small hamlet upstate, and had been called into a meeting about my story, which, as it turned out, had upset a lot of people. ~ Tom Barbash

I will probably die a misunderstood virgin like Ophelia in HAMLET, only I won't do it by floating down a stream, singing my own mad song. They'll just find me here, on my bed, on a weekend night, my dead body slumped over a homework assignment.
Hopefully they'll discover me before Teeny eats my remains. ~ Stephanie Wardrop

We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us. ~ William Shakespeare

'Hamlet' is obviously a role a lot of actors want to portray or be involved with in some way and that I'd like to be involved in. ~ Jamie Campbell Bower

I am very proud, revengeful,
ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,
or time to act them in. ~ William Shakespeare

Great. A vampire with bruised feelings is a disaster waiting to happen. He's either terrorizing Will or moping around like Hamlet. ~ Jennifer Harlow

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. ~ William Shakespeare

Like, that was weird in 'Hamlet 2,' because I played myself there, fully myself, but then I realized, 'Oh, I'm not playing myself. I'm some weird version of myself.' So as an actress, you're always playing something, I don't even know who I am, how could I become me? I don't know what that is. ~ Elisabeth Shue

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely - Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? ~ William Shakespeare

I've read Hamlet, I know men suffer. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Richard III is not likeable. Macbeth is not likeable. Hamlet is not likeable. And yet you can't take your eyes off them. I'm far more interested in that than I am in any sort of likeability. ~ Beau Willimon

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending ... you're still enthralled.
(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.) ~ Hilary Mantel

A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine. ~ Hector Berlioz

Hamlet is a little daunting. ~ Kyle MacLachlan