Quotes & Sayings About Canterbury Tales

But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales was expected to clock in at anywhere between 100 and 120 chapters. Unfortunately, the dude only managed to finish 24 tales before he suffered an insurmountable and permanent state of writer's block commonly known as death. — Jacopo Della Quercia

No one, I fancy, would discredit a story that the Archbishop of Canterbury slipped on a banana skin merely because he found that a similar comic mishap had been reported of many people, and especially of elderly gentlemen of dignity. — J.R.R. Tolkien

For he would rather have at his bed's head Some twenty books, all bound in black and red, Of Aristotle and his philosophy Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery. ========== Canterbury Tales — Anonymous

Patience is a conquering virtue. — Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity of cultural influences which the author had at his disposal. Literature, with Chaucer, has taken on a new role: as well as affirming a developing language, it is a mirror of its times - but a mirror which teases as it reveals, which questions while it narrates, and which opens up a range of issues and questions, instead of providing simple, easy answers. — Ronald Carter

Unfortunately, unless the job description included a translation of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was dreadfully under-qualified. — Rachel Vincent

English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin. — Robert Graves

For if a priest be foul, on whom we trust,
No wonder is a common man should rust
-The Prologue of Chaucers Canterbury Tales- — Geoffrey Chaucer

If gold rusts, what then can iron do? — Geoffrey Chaucer

Until we're rotten, we cannot be ripe. — Geoffrey Chaucer

people can die of mere imagination - Geffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales — Paul Strohm

Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. 'Do you know ... ' he began.
I knew many things, but I didn't think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment. — Lauren Willig

This backwards journey in the narrating of this 'membering, this remembrance, is a lesson I learned from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and which considers how language, in this case, English, the only language I know, is at present of profound interest, when used in a non-traditional manner. I have used this language in The Polished Hoe, and I call it many things, but the most precise definition I have given it is contained in a booklet published by the Giller Prize Foundation, celebrating the tenth anniversary of this literary prize. In that review of the literary problems I faced in the writing of The Polished Hoe in 2002, my main concern was to find a language, or to more strictly use the language I already knew, in such a way that it became, in my manipulation of it, a "new" language. And to explain the result of this experiment, I said that I intended to "creolize Oxford English. — Austin Clarke

I read a lot of The Canterbury Tales on my phone, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading. — Rick Moody

It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his Characters of Men.
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past,
These are indeed exceptions; but they show
How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow
Into the arctic regions of our lives.
Where little else than life itself survives. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I liked reading about the nun who ate so dainty with her fingers she never dripped any grease on herself. I've never been able to make that claim and I use a fork. — Helene Hanff