Hamlet Quotes - page 6
Rosencrantz Do you take me for a sponge, my lord hamlet Ay, sir that soaks up the kings countenance, his rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best service in the end he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner of his jaw first mouthed, to be last swallowed when he needs what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you shall be dry again. rosencrantz I understand you not, my lord. hamlet I am glad of it a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.
William Shakespeare
Scholars are still in search of the exact meaning of certain speeches in each of Shakespeare's great tragedies - and we should like to assume that those who saw these plays for the first time did not have perfect understanding of all of the lines - but so great was Shakespeare's power to conceive of action from which thought and feeling can be readily inferred that all of us know Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth more intimately than we know many men whose remarks we understand perfectly.
Norman Maclean
And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.'
Martin Luther King Jr.
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth century prophets left their little villages and carried their 'thus saith the Lord' far beyond the boundaries of their home towns and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Martin Luther King Jr.
I first auditioned Kate Winslet when she was 17. I thought she was 25. Such was her self-possession, presence and concentration...later, I cast her as Ophelia in a film of Shakespeare's Hamlet. I did not ask her to audition...She listened with superhuman acuity, and expressed character with effortless depth... (now) those same qualities are radiant, having now evolved into a truly awesome acting technique. Only now, hers is the art that entirely hides the artist...It's magnificent to watch.
Kate Winslet
If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since.
William Faulkner
I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"
Bob Dylan
Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced with Othello, say, he would have to divide the man into departments, like a liberal arts course. Race relations - that's still a subject, although of course whites can't write about blacks and vice versa; sexual politics (somehow); Othello's ultimate therapy and decision to endure. Since jealousy is now curable, like TB, we can't have people dying of it anymore. A few rap sessions, some fearless touching, and a new sense of self-worth would have Othello and Iago and Hamlet and Juliet back on their feet in no time; and Fiction struggling.
Wilfrid Sheed
