Chaucerian Quotes & Sayings

That's not a goal," Kit said.
"Why? Because it's not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory, or a thousand small ones? — Kij Johnson

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore. — Stephen Fry

Competition is warfare. Mostly it is played by prescribed rules
there is a sort of Geneva Convention for competition
but it's thorough and often brutal. — Andy Grove

And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. — Dennis Banks

Angela Carter ... refused to join in rejecting or denouncing fairy tales, but instead embraced the whole stigmatized genre, its stock characters and well-known plots, and with wonderful verve and invention, perverse grace and wicked fun, soaked them in a new fiery liquor that brought them leaping back to life. From her childhood, through her English degree at the University of Bristol where she specialised in Medieval Literature, and her experiences as a young woman on the folk-music circuit in the West Country, Angela Carter was steeped in English and Celtic faerie, in romances of chivalry and the grail, Chaucerian storytelling and Spenserian allegory, and she was to become fairy tale's rescuer, the form's own knight errant, who seized hold of it in its moribund state and plunged it into the fontaine de jouvence itself.
(from "Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter") — Marina Warner

I too get goosebumps when someone talks of national pride and integrity but my brain knows better. What is there to be so proud of pieces of land? People die for them. They kill each other for them. They behave as if being born on this piece makes them superior to the people living on other pieces. Just because people who speak the same language and eat the same food surround you makes you a proud owner of the land you share, completely ignoring the fact that given a chance, the same people can slit your throat at the slightest provocation? — Amit Sharma

She had begun to bake to have her eyes looking at a bowl, a flour bin, an oven, a fire, a face, anything but water. Her hands shaped loaves like scallop shells, like moon shells, like starfish; she ate them as if she ate the sea, to make it part of her, to transform bone to shell and lose herself in it, eyeless, thoughtless, wrapped in memories and anchored on some hoary rock against the currents of the deep. — Patricia A. McKillip

One more thing: Linda, can you get to Canterbury and take over my Chaucerian Society? They're at Dovecote Hostelry in the old city. We're visiting all the scenes of the great murders. Tomorrow they want to see where Becket was killed. They're a bloodthirsty lot, it seems. — Cinda Williams Chima

As the family weakens, our welfare and correctional bureaucracies grow. — Sherif Girgis

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all. — Neal Stephenson

Pat Robertson at a national convention, equipped with delegates, certainly remains a terrible sight. He is a charlatan of Chaucerian dimensions. — Martin Amis

The tongue has the power of life and death.1 — Gary Chapman

Umbrellas raining upon me, as these cloudy tears give me shelter. — Anthony Liccione

And that's when I realized that there's really two ways people cry. You cry when you're sorry for yourself, and then you cry when you are really sad. The tears you cry for yourself? Those are kid tears. You're crying because you want somebody to help you or pick you up. Your mom, your dad, the old lady next door ... anyone. — Fuyumi Ono

There's something Vichy about the French. — Ivor Novello

Christ, what an asshole! Babette said. — Herman Koch

I want to see gay couples stuck with their significant other at Home Depot with that far away look in their eye, get me out of here. — David Alan Grier

I am on the board of corporations who contribute both to environmental problems and their solutions. And I am on the NGO side: the Earth Council and other organizations. — Maurice Strong