Quotes from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“at Cambridge, a graduate in grammar in the late Middle Ages was required to demonstrate his pedagogical fitness by flogging a dull or recalcitrant boy.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father who cannot be trusted.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit,” quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Everyone understood that Latin learning was inseparable from whipping. One educational theorist of the time speculated that the buttocks were created in order to facilitate the learning of Latin.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Jaques’ vision in the same comedy of “the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Can honour set-to a leg?” Falstaff asks, at the brink of battle.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life” (5.3.57–58).”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Venus and Adonis is a spectacular display of Shakespeare’s signature characteristic, his astonishing capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, to assume all positions and to slip free of all constraints. The capacity depends upon a simultaneous, deeply paradoxical achievement of proximity and distance, intimacy and detachment.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“The group shared a combination of extreme marginality and arrogant snobbishness.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Thou wilt not utter what thou dost not know. And so far will I trust thee,”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.”
― Stephen Greenblatt, quote from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

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Popular quotes

“I gave myself a little shake. So if Gideon was carrying on as if nothing had happened—well, thanks a lot, I could do the same. “Okay, let’s get out of here,” I said brightly. “I’m cold.”
I tried to push past him, but he took hold of my arm and stopped me. “Listen, about all that just now . . .” He stopped, probably hoping I was going to interrupt him.
Which of course I wasn’t. I was only too keen to hear what he had to say. I also found breathing difficult when he was standing so close to me.
“That kiss . . . I didn’t mean . . .” Once again it was only half a sentence. But I immediately finished it in my mind.
I didn’t mean it that way.
Well, obviously, but then he shouldn’t have done it, should he? It was like setting fire to a curtain and then wondering why the whole house burned down. (Okay, silly comparison.) I wasn’t going to make it any easier for him. I looked at him coolly and expectantly. That is, I tried to look at him coolly and expectantly, but I probably really had an expression on my face saying, Oh, I’m cute little Bambie, please don’t shoot me! There was nothing I could do about that. All I needed was for my lower lip to start trembling.
I didn’t mean it that way! Go on, say it!
But Gideon didn’t say anything. He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of strands must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting in it), took one strand, and wound it around his finger. With his other hand, he began stroking my fact, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes—and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission. (Well, all it was transmitting was oh, hmm, and more!)
But that lasted only about ten seconds, because then a voice right beside us said, irritated, “Not starting that stuff up again, are you?”
― Kerstin Gier, quote from Sapphire Blue

“For a long time we watched her as she went along the drive, her yellowish raincoat looking sick and bright in the sharp sunshine, her black plumes nodding like the pines above, her cheap boots making her walk on her heels, a spreading stain on the fabric of our life.”
― Rebecca West, quote from The Return of The Soldier

“people don't generally believe themselves to be evil. Just strong. And they think that the world owes them something”
― Mary Elizabeth Summer, quote from Trust Me, I'm Lying

“...medité en ese laberinto perdido: lo imaginé inviolado y perfecto en la cumbre secreta de una montaña, lo imaginé borrado por arrozales o debajo del agua, lo imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos... Pensé en un laberinto de laberintos, en un sinuoso laberinto creciente que abarca el pasado y el porvenir y que implicara de algún modo a los astros.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Fictions

“Revolution and terror are synonymous; only with the passage of time does any revolution become respectable.”
― T.R. Fehrenbach, quote from This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness

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