Quotes About Shakespeare

Hollywood es la antítesis de lo ruso. Todo diversión, nada de sustancia. Más al oeste no hay nada. Si le gusta la carne poco hecha, lea a Tolstoi. Si demasiado pasada, vea Transformers. —¿Y usted? —A mí me gusta al punto. Justo en el medio. Dickens. Shakespeare. —

Forget Romeo and Juliet. This was much closer to The Taming of the Shrew.

I look forward to the day when indigenous actors can play Hamlet and Ophelia and not just Othello and Desdemona.

There is certainly no one 'type' of writer who deliberately draws on Shakespeare. In fact, there's a strong argument that everyone writing in the English language is influenced by Shakespeare because, to a considerable degree, he shaped that language.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

I play guitar; you'll find me at home strumming 'Vincent' on the guitar. I also read a lot of poetry, and Shakespeare was my first love, which was why I got into acting. A lot of the fighters are intelligent!

Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended.

Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and the Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare

There's a Shakespeare quote," she said. "From Hamlet. He says that death is—and I think I have the quote right—an undiscovered country from whose borne no traveler returns." He

Consciousness is the materia poetica that Shakespeare sculpts as Michelangelo sculpts marble. We feel the consciousness of Hamlet or Iago, and our own consciousness strangely expands.

Shakespeare will not allow Falstaff to die upon stage. We see and hear the deaths of Hamlet, Cleopatra, Antony, Othello, and Lear. Iago is led away to die silently under torture. Macbeth dies offstage but he goes down fighting. Falstaff dies singing the Twenty-third Psalm, smiling upon his fingertips, playing with flowers, and crying aloud to God three or four times. That sounds more like pain than prayer. We do not want Sir John Falstaff to die. And of course he does not. He is life itself.

Shakespeare's exquisite imagining belies our total inability to live in the present moment.

Jesus is present only as a supreme representation of suffering and change, one that Shakespeare (in his dangerous era) shrewdly and invariably avoided.

If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and the groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

But Hamlet is death's ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.

The pre-Socratic aphorism—ethos is the daemon—can be translated as "character is fate." In drama, character is action. Shakespeare, too capacious for any formula, leads me to a rival aphorism: Pathos also is the daemon, which could be rendered as "personality is our destiny." In Shakespearean theatricalism, personality is suffering. Action, Wordsworth wrote, is momentary, while suffering is permanent, obscure, dark, and shares the nature of infinity.

A political reading of Shakespeare is bound to be less interesting than a Shakespearean reading of politics [.]

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I again recall provoking resentment by dubbing the American bard "a male lesbian," much as Shakespeare was when writing the sonnets.

Nossos atuais neo-historicistas, com sua curiosa mistura de Foucault e Marx, são apenas um episódio bem menor na interminável história do platonismo. Platão esperava, banindo o poeta, banir também o tirano. Banir Shakespeare, ou antes reduzi-lo a seus contextos, não vai livrar-nos de nossos tiranos.

The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools.

Is becoming wise an act of knowledge? For Nietzsche, the greatest thoughts were the greatest actions. Thinking in and through metaphors, Shakespeare gives us persons who act with titanic self-destructiveness, incarnate sublimity:

cannot, with Nietzsche and with Pater, believe that life can only be appreciated as an aesthetic phenomenon. But I wish to believe that, and perhaps Judaic tradition blocks me from it. Wisdom needs to be added to aesthetic splendor and cognitive power as the three stigmata or criteria of knowledge or value. But where except in Shakespeare are all three to be discovered consistently?

The elliptical mode in her poetry recalls late Shakespeare but is more extreme. A daemonic drive to negate precursors while maintaining their standards of excellence distinguishes her from some recent poetical ideologues of the feminist persuasion, whether in verse or prose. They claim Dickinson as ancestor, yet they do her wrong, she being so majestical, to offer her the show of violence.