Quotes About Boccaccio

One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers, said Lady Swaffham. Like dramatists, you know--so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: 'Ods bodikins! There's that girl again!

One demands a little originality in these days, even from murderers," said Lady Swaffham. "Like dramatists, you know—so much easier in Shakespeare's time, wasn't it? Always the same girl dressed up as a man, and even that borrowed from Boccaccio or Dante or somebody. I'm sure if I'd been a Shakespeare hero, the very minute I saw a slim-legged young page-boy I'd have said: 'Ods-bodikins! There's that girl again!

In Florence the sublime and terrible go hand in hand: Savonarola's Bonfires of the Vanities and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and Niccolò Macchiavelli's The Prince, Dante's Inferno and Boccaccio's Decameron.

I am one who could have forgotten the plague, listening to Boccaccio's stories; and I am not ashamed of it.

Laughter, on the other hand, Petrarch went on, is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

No-thing less splendid than a golden sepulchre would have suited so noble a heart.

They brought it to a common saying there that the most acceptable service one could render to God was to put the devil in Hell

The same fact that Boccaccio offers in support of religion might be adduced in behalf of a republic: It exists in spite of its ministers."

It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.' She laughs. 'They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.