Spenser Quotes

• I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

  Dave Barry

  Book, Years, Want

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

  Anna Brackett

  Plato, Book, Reading

  4 Copy quote

• English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not the wild man in her, became extinct.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Animal, Men, Lakes

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “Civil Disobedience & Other Essays - Premium Collection: 26 Political, Philosophical & Historical Essays: Slavery in Massachusetts, Life Without Principle, The Landlord, Walking, Sir Walter Raleigh, Paradise (to be) Regained, Herald of Freedom, A Plea for Captain John Brown, The Highland Light, Dark Ages…”, p.167, e-artnow

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an imperfect image,--the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual, Venus,--whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons,--breathes, the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Spiritual, Children, Book

  4 Copy quote

• The light of genius never sets, but sheds itself upon other faces, in different hues of splendor. Homer glows in the softened beauty of Virgil, and Spenser revives in the decorated learning of Gray.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Light, Different, Genius

  Robert Aris Willmott (1866). “Pleasures, Objects, and Advantages of Literature”, p.6

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Book, Giving, Dinner

  5 Copy quote

• Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

  Camille Paglia

  Writing, Ideas, Hands

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The church itself has got to go outside of its own borders and carry the gospel to ev'ry creature, or it is no church of Christ; and any mutual improvement club which thinks that by reading its Shakspearo, or by acting its pretty tableaux, or by having. this or that little reading from Spenser and from Chaucer, it is going to lift itself up into any higher order of culture or life, is wholly mistaken, unless as an essential part of its duty, it goes out into the world, finds those that are falling down, and lifts them up to the majesty of freemen, who are sons of God.

  Edward Everett Hale

  Fall, Reading, Son

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, 1895.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Song, Writing, Pay

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.24

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Immortal Spenser, no frailty hath thy fame but the imputation of this idiot's friendship!

  Thomas Nashe

  Idiot, Fame, Frailty

  1592 Strange News of the Intercepting Certain Letters.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, And art alive still, while thy book doth live, And we have wits to read , and praise to give .

  Ben Jonson

  Art, Lying, Book

  Ben Jonson (1985). “Ben Jonson”, Oxford University Press, USA

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• A. E. Maxwell wrote one of the smartest, most consistent PI series in recent memory. Big plots, great villains, and a kickass private eye with plenty of humanity. The toughness of Robert B. Parker's early Spenser novels blended with the wry humor and scope of Ross Thomas. Wholly original, endlessly entertaining. The books of A. E. Maxwell are a forgotten treasure.

  Tim Maleeny

  Memories, Book, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.

  Joseph Conrad

  Taken, Sleep, Sea

  6 Copy quote

• You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Dream, Business

  7 Copy quote

• Yeah. Floyd is his batman." His what?" Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant." You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don't make you money than anybody I know.

  Robert B. Parker

  Reading, Army, Stuff

  Robert B. Parker (2009). “Mortal Stakes”, p.167, Dell

  7 Copy quote

  Show source