Norton Shakespeare Quotes

Anything that's mended is but patched. Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue

My life written as a theater production would be considered a tragedy. My life written by the good times experienced, would be considered a fairytale.

from the robust thirty of the year before. The spacious classroom on the second floor of Boston’s towering new Masonic temple, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott arrayed in its four corners, was beginning to look empty in the weak winter sunlight that filtered through its single enormous Palladian window. The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of Conversations appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.” The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.

One quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giving us concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, "The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus.... who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare... Wordsworth … Keats.

One quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giving us concrete, vivid particulars. Rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, "The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited fac-ulty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus.... who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us partic-pate in their life; it is Shakespeare... Wordsworth … Keats.