Stephen Greenblatt · 464 pages
Rating: (6.9K votes)
“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
“I want to be his love slave. An image of me in a black corset wearing a collar with a leash attached to it pops into my head. Maybe stupid Lydia was right to cut the smut from the book club for a while.”
― Helena Hunting, quote from Pucked
“her father’s generation must be the last generation of English people who would have such a choice. War or no war, it was all coming to an end, and the end could not come neatly. There would be people who had to be victims of the fact that it could not. She herself was surely one of them,”
― Paul Scott, quote from The Day of the Scorpion
“If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.”
― William Shakespeare, quote from The Comedy of Errors
“Like the children in fairy stories who have seen their parents make pacts with terrifying strangers, who have discovered that our fears are based on nothing but the truth, but who come back fresh from marvellous escapes and take up their knives and forks, with humility and good manners, prepared to live happily ever after -- like them, dazed and powerful with secrets, I never said a word”
― Alice Munro, quote from Selected Stories
“You'll stay in the surveillance vehicle and assist McNab. Any arguments from you, Detective?" she said, looking at McNab.
"No. No, sir, Lieutenant." He patted Peabody on the back. "You okay, honey?"
"No honeys!" Eve pulled at her hair. "There are no honeys on an op, for sweet Christ's sake. Keep it up, just keep it up, and I'm having one of you transferred to Queens.”
― J.D. Robb, quote from Purity in Death
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