Quotes About Don Quixote

All of Spain is contained in DON QUIXOTE—-a decrepit society unaware the world has passed it by.

Don Quixote's 'Delusions' is an excellent read - far better than my own forthcoming travel book, 'Walking Backwards Across Tuscany.'

The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit.

Do we trust the idea of love, no matter how mad – from Don Quixote's love for the farm girl he renames Dulcinea del Toboso to Yossarian's love for the chaplain – because in the face of conformity, the madder the love, in some mysterious way the greater the commitment to freedom?

The three greatest fools (majaderos) of history have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote - and I!

Marco lives in a fantasy world, one that's more interesting and more fun than reality. That's the definition of being insane, surely?" said my son, Raul "I suppose so," I said. "It's like Don Quixote.

I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.

If you read novels of the 19th century, they're pretty experimental. They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You've got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like 'Tristram Shandy' or 'Don Quixote'.

corselet, without his coat of mail, without his cuisses; a Don Quixote clothed in a woolen doublet, the blue color of which had faded into a nameless shade between lees of wine and a heavenly azure; face long and brown; high cheek bones, a sign of sagacity; the maxillary muscles enormously developed

You'll laugh at me, of course"—Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative—"but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are the men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all's said and done, there probably were giants about.

So illusion is delusion, and I have been Don Quixote, and nothing that I loved or dreamed existed. I am empty-handed now, a woman with an aching body. Lost. Weeping. Weeping. Saying yes to the analyst like a child.

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Just as Don Quixote, whose preposterous idealism and touchy pride immediately struck a chord with the Spanish, so Pinocchio speaks to Italians in a very special way as a caricature of many of their national virtues and vices.

When I put on my consumer hat, and I'm buying tickets to be entertained, I'm not interested in seeing, like, 'Don Quixote.' Unless someone really spectacular is dancing.

You are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky.

Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

He said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw—that of outright unreadability.

All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.

Had Don Quixote been simply and plainly mad, or had he indulged in a protracted game of self-deception and play-acting, we should not be talking of him now, Van Doren observes—"We are talking of him because we suspect that, in the end, he did become a knight.

Not exactly what the world was looking for, a musical on 'Don Quixote.' It was required reading in high school.

You," Win would tell him, "have a hero complex. You think you can make the world better. You are Don Quixote tilting at windmills." "And you?" "I'm eye candy for the ladies." Win.

Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.