Quotes About Chaucer

Chaucer, I confess, is a rough diamond; and must be polished e'er he shines.

That of all the floures in the mede, Thanne love I most these floures white and rede, Suche as men callen daysyes in her toune.

My house is small, but you are learned men And by your arguments can make a place Twenty foot broad as infinite as space.

Becca had gone through many, many years of schooling in her life. She'd spent more hours in libraries than she could begin to calculate. Yet this was the first time she'd ever made out in one. As he claimed her mouth for the second time against the volumes of Chaucer, she realized all she'd missed out on in the past.

Geoffrey Chaucer's tender-hearted prioress, Madame Eglantyne, who was said to weep at the sight of a mouse caught in a trap, would nevertheless have had a gallows on her property, upon which, at the hands of her bailiff, she would have hanged thieves.

Geoffrey Chaucer, the first author in the English language, devoted the longest story in The Canterbury Tales to the Asian conqueror Genghis Khan of the Mongols.

When I see imposters like … Swinburne, [and] Fleay, who know as much early English as my dog, & who fancy they can settle Chaucer difficulties as they blow their noses, then I ridicule or kick them. But earnest students I treat with respect, & am only too glad to learn from them.

The language of Homer lay still further off. Imagine a twenty-first-century Texan reading Chaucer.

'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.

The Pestilence recurred at intervals throughout the fourteenth century, in 1361, 1369, 1375 and 1390, at times when the country was already under the stress of the French War. Cities were emptied of population, the countryside was desolate. Life did not begin to return to normal until about the time of Chaucer's death in 1400.

The worshipful father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in our English, I mean Master Geoffrey Chaucer.

Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

Soul of the Age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise; I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room; Thou art a monument without a tomb.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.