Chaucer Quotes

• No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

  Harold Bloom

  Strong, Enough, Milton

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• The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us.

  James Lee Burke

  Jesus, Knights, Agamemnon

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• The Italian prose tale had begun to exercise that influence as early as Chaucer's time: but circumstances and atmosphere were as yet unfavourable for its growth.

  George Saintsbury

  Exercise, Italian, Atmosphere

  George Saintsbury (2012). “The English Novel”, p.44, tredition

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• Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Years, Voice

  Virginia Woolf (1989). “A Room of One's Own”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

  Mark Twain

  Sorry, Greatness, Names

  Mark Twain's speech to the Savage Club (June 9, 1899), as quoted in "Mark Twain's Speeches" edited by William Dean Howells (pp. 277-278), 1910.

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• On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would haveheld up his head in their company.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Littles, Reputation, Impress

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.295, Courier Corporation

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• The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity: of Spencer, remoteness: of Milton elevation and of Shakespeare everything.

  William Hazlitt

  Writing, Intensity, Milton

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• The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.

  James Russell Lowell

  Fall, Simple, Tears

  James Russell Lowell (1845). “Conversations on Some of the Old Poets”, p.16

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

  Harold Bloom

  Education, Reality, Self

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.

  Jean Aitchison

  Writing, Years, Vintage

  Jean Aitchison (2013). “Language Change: Progress Or Decay?”, p.14, Cambridge University Press

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• In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That isn't the way people write.' I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn't done deliberately.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Character

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “A Circle of Quiet”, p.130, Open Road Media

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• First impressions of mediaeval life are usually coloured by the courtly romances of Malory and his later refiners. Chaucer brings us down to reality, but his people belong to a prosperous middle-class world, on holiday and in holiday mood. Piers Plowman stands alone as a revelation of the ignorance and misery of the lower classes, whose multiplied grievances came to a head in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

  William Langland

  Holiday, Ignorance, Reality

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• Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled,On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.

  Edmund Spenser

  Fame, Wells

  Edmund Spenser, Philip Masterman (1839). “The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser”, p.20

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• Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer Said once about the long toil that goes like blood to the poems making? Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls, Limp as bindweed, if it break at all Life's iron crust Man, you must sweat And rhyme your guts taut, if you'd build Your verse a ladder.

  R. S. Thomas

  Men, Blood, Sweat

  R.S. Thomas (2012). “Collected Poems: 1945-1990 R.S.Thomas: Collected Poems : R S Thomas”, p.85, Hachette UK

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• In one particular chapter in Ulysses, James Joyce imitates every major writing style that's been used by English and American writers over the last 700 years - starting with Beowulf and Chaucer and working his way up through the Renaissance, the Victorian era and on into the 20th century.

  Frederick Lenz

  Writing, Years, Style

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• Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

  James Russell Lowell

  Reading, Sunrise, Grass

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• 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.

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• You know what my favourite quotation is?.. It's from Chaucer... Criseyde says it, "I am myne owene woman, wel at ese."

  Mary McCarthy

  Favourite, Knows, Quotations

  "The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt". Short story by ary McCarthy, first published in "Partisan Review", 1941.

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• 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

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• Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Pain, Greek, Age

  John Greenleaf Whittier (2012). “Personal Poems, Complete Volume IV., the Works of Whittier: Personal Poems”, p.162, tredition

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• The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and James and Conrad. Time does not make their voices fainter, on the contrary, it reinforces our sense of their truth-telling capacity.

  Wendy Lesser

  Self, Voice, Greek

  Wendy Lesser (2014). “Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books”, p.98, Macmillan

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• And Chaucer, with his infantine Familiar clasp of things divine.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Divinity, Divine, Familiar

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2009). “Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems”, p.145, Broadview Press

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• I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America. Neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in Mythology than in any history of America so called that I have seen.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Names, America

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “Excursions, and Poems - The Writings of Henry David Thoreau”, p.132, Read Books Ltd

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• Of course I didn't pioneer the use of food in fiction: it has been a standard literary device since Chaucer and Rabelais, who used food wonderfully as a metaphor for sensuality.

  Joanne Harris

  Pioneers, Fiction, Use

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