Quotes & Sayings About Beatrice Dante

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom - we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you're a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can't go anywhere if you can't step out onto a road ...
... (T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it's not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people's ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable. — Vanessa Veselka

The writer, having lost his way in a gloomy forest, and being hindered by certain wild beasts from ascending a mountain, is met by Virgil, who promises to show him the punishments of Hell, and afterwards of Purgatory; and that he shall then be conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. He follows the Roman Poet. — Dante Alighieri

She wanted to be someone's muse - to be worshipped and adored, body and soul. She wanted to play Beatrice to a dashing and noble Dante and to inhabit Paradise with him forever. And to live a life that would rival the beauty of Botticelli's illustrations. — Sylvain Reynard

The Beatrice that obsessed Dante was a Florentine named Bice di Folco Portinari. Envision this moment (and, in all fairness, I am envisioning it the way Henry Holiday did in his exquisite nineteenth-century painting): Bice is walking beside the Arno River, dressed in white, the fabric clinging to her legs and outlining her slender thighs, and there is Dante. He meets her at the corner of one of the bridges that span
the river. His left hand, at first glimpse, is moving casually toward his hip; it is only on a more careful study that one realizes his hand is actually going up to his heart. Meanwhile, his right hand is resting on the bridge's waist-high stone balustrade, as if Bico's beauty is such that he needs to steady himself when he beholds her. — Chris Bohjalian

As at those words did I myself become;
And all my love was so absorbed in Him,
That in oblivion Beatrice was eclipsed. — Dante Alighieri

I saw - no, I think the word is beheld - the most wondrous thing in the world. This church was indescribably complex and harmonious; it was like stepping into the mind of God. I was overcome by the desire to worship - a feeling I would not see as adequately articulated until many years later, when I would read Dante Alighieri's description, in his first book, Vita nuova, of the first time he, as a child, saw Beatrice: — Rod Dreher

Ink to parchment, words to paper, glory to Beatrice. — Dante Alighieri

The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams's The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin's Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta's Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw's Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else. — Rod Dreher

You found me in my lonely labyrinth and like Beatrice, led me out of my own hell ... — John Geddes

I think Dante would agree with you. Even though Beatrice married someone else and died young, Dante loved her his entire life. The love was a part of him, because to him, Beatrice was ideal. He barely knew her, had only met her twice, but yet he truly claimed to love her. Can anyone tell me why?"No one spoke up. Carmine sighed exasperatedly. This lesson was becoming frustrating to sit through. "Because he really loved the person she made him. It has just as much to do with how he felt as it did with who she was.""You're right," Mrs. Chavis said. "Dante said of her, 'she has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation.' To him, she was his savior, the epitome of good. She rid him of his evil, made him feel worthwhile. That, we could argue, may be what he loved most of all. — J.M. Darhower

While the everlasting pleasure, that did full On Beatrice shine, with second view From her fair countenance my gladden'd soul Contented; vanquishing me with a beam Of her soft smile, she spake: Turn thee, and list. These eyes are not thy only Paradise. — Dante Alighieri

Church of painful love - unfulfilled,unrequited & unattained — Dan Brown