During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love.... it was Shakespeare w...ho said, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes." It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn't matter to anyone any more.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented wit...h flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A quibble is to Shakespeare what luminous vapours are to the traveller: he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him ou...t of his way and sure to engulf him in the mire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live... And we have wits to read and praise to give.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.... For though the poet's matter Nature be, His art doth give the fashion; and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame, Or, for the laurel, he may gain a scorn; For a good poet's made, as well as born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
1st Murderer. Where's thy conscience now?... 2nd Murderer. I'll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward.... It fills a ma...n full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »