Shakespearian Quotes & Sayings

You can never, ever worry about making mistakes or things like that. I'm going to go out and play ball, and that's what I do. — Mario Williams

Life repeats Shakespearian themes more often than we think. Did Lady Macbeth, Richard III, and King Claudius exist only in the Middle Ages? Shylock wanted to cut a pound of flesh from the body of the merchant of Venice. Is that a fairy tale? — Varlam Shalamov

She realized he'd stopped to change his coat and it clung to him in perfectly tailored lines. He stood leaning on his cane, hair neatly pushed back from his pale brow, a black glass boy of deadly edges.
The look of surprise on Haskell's face was nearly comical. Then he started to laugh. "Well, I'll be a son of a bitch, Brekker. You have to be the craziest bastard I ever met. — Leigh Bardugo

Jane Austen, who is said to be Shakespearian, never reminds us of Shakespeare, I think, in her full-dress portraits, but she does so in characters such as Miss Bates and Mrs. Allen. — A. C. Bradley

Even her hair, she thought, running her fingers impatiently through the damp golden brown ringlets that curled romantically around her face. A Botticelli angel, a boy in college once called her, begging her to let it grow. Right! That was all she needed: wild curls cascading down her back like a doomed Shakespearian virgin, or a rock star. — Naomi Ragen

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden. — Harold Bloom

If someone said, "Here, you have your pick, you can do either a musical, Moulin Rouge type of movie, where you sing and dance, or an action movie, or a Shakespearian or Elizabethan movie," I would definitely love to do a movie that was based on a musical, where I would get to sing, dance and act, all at the same time. — Megalyn Echikunwoke

Some cities you go to because you want to; some cities you go to because they want you to. — Elif Shafak

I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height. — Dar Williams

Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience. — Ray Stevenson

Transported to a different culture, thought often loses its subtlety and can even rampage like a wild beast. — Minae Mizumura

As the novelty of wearable tech gives way to necessity - and, later, as wearable tech becomes embedded tech - will we be deprived of the chance to pause, reflect, and engage in meaningful, substantive conversations? How will our inner lives and ties to those around us change? — Klaus Schwab

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present. — Tim Parks

Only in Brutus and his fellow-conspirators - of all Shakespearian characters - do we find the least consideration for liberty, and even then he makes the common, and perhaps in his time the unavoidable, mistake of overlooking the genuinely democratic leanings of Julius Caesar and the anti-popular character of the successful plot against him. — William Shakespeare

I'm thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film. It's appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes 'Catching Fire' while simultaneously promoting the Capitol's punitive forms of entertainment. — Suzanne Collins

I refused to do a lot on mobile Internet until around 2009. But because we didn't start early, it took us some time to figure out what's the important thing, what's the most relevant thing for Baidu. — Robin Li

Coleridge's description of Iago's actions as "motiveless malignancy" applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers two reasons for wishing to injure Othello and Cassio. He tells Roderigo that, in appointing Cassio to be his lieutenant, Othello has treated him unjustly, in which conversation he talks like the conventional Elizabethan malcontent. In his soliloquies with himself, he refers to his suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made him a cuckold, and here he talks like the conventional jealous husband who desires revenge. But there are, I believe, insuperable objections to taking these reasons, as some critics have done, at their face value. — W. H. Auden

REVISITING THE LIST
1. Kiss Estelle
Okay, at least I've met her. She thinks I'm a creep. And that's withought her knowing I've read her diaries. Unless we somehow fall over, exactly aligned, lip to lip, and gravity causes the pressure, or we find ourselves in a darkened room and through a series of Shakespearian ID muddles she thinks she's kissing someone else, I can't say how this is ever going to happen. — Fiona Wood

None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath. — Marian Anderson

In serious Victorian fiction, as in Shakespearian tragedy, melodrama normally functions as metaphor. The author finds a vivid equivalent for a reality too elaborate or too extended to be briefly depicted. — Ian Gregor

Mykonos, which probably meant it was time for them to get — Rick Riordan

I've lived, laughed, lost, and loved again the whole Shakespearian thing. — Fran Drescher

A food truce, the picnic suspension of oedipal feeling that permits the generations to love each other at family reunions. — Karen Russell

Kindness, Peter," said the voice softly, "kindness. That is the first commandment, perhaps the only one. That is why I had to pan that new play, in my column yesterday. That play lacked essential kindness. We must be kind Peter, to everybody around us. We must accept and forgive - there is so much to be forgiven in each one of us. If you learn to love everything, the humblest, the least, the meanest, then the meanest in you will be loved. Then we'll find the sense of universal equality, the great peace of brotherhood, a new world, Peter, a beautiful new world ... . — Ayn Rand

You may shelve your Shakespearian plans for the present. I am going to play Peter Pan. — Maude Adams

I'm a big lover of Shakespeare. In fact, the only plays that I've ever done professionally in New York have been Shakespearian. — Samira Wiley

My life will not be significantly impoverished if I never see another Shakespearian comedy. — Colin Dexter

I don't discount a magical hand of fate. I am an actor, after all, and a Shakespearian, no less. But it can't be the ruling force of your life. You have to be the driver. — Gayle Forman

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium ... Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author ... far from being the height of perfection, [King Lear] is a very bad, carelessly composed production, ... can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness ... All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language ... — Leo Tolstoy

She's the coolest person in the world ... I don't date what the person does ... You know what I mean? I could have been a zitty teenager and walked into a Tower Records, and we would have talked about Pearl Jam, and we would have fallen in love when we were 15. And that's when you know. It's like, oh, my God, game over ... Listen, there are a lot of women in this country, in many countries, who date men for their money. Okay? That's despicable. Right? That's not what we're talking about here. Whatever does it for you, man. — Adam Levine

The prize is in the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it [my work]
those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me. — Richard Feynman