Top Beowulf Quotes

Browse top 13 famous quotes and sayings about Beowulf by most favorite authors.

Favorite Beowulf Quotes

1. "Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it."
Author: A. N. Wilson
2. "Quickly, the dragon came at him, encouragedAs Beowulf fell back; its breath flared,And he suffered, wrapped around in swirlingFlames -- a king, before, but nowA beaten warrior. None of his comradesCame to him, helped him, his brave and nobleFollowers; they ran for their lives, fledDeep in a wood. And only one of themRemained, stood there, miserable, remembering,As a good man must, what kinship should mean."
Author: Burton Raffel
3. "Beloved Beowulf, remember how you boasted,Once, that nothing in the world would everDestroy your fame; fight to keep it,Now, be strong and brave, my nobleKing, protecting life and fameTogether. My sword will fight at your side!"
Author: Burton Raffel
4. "By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?"
Author: C.S. Lewis
5. "There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil."
Author: Dorothy Parker
6. "Poem Written in a Copy of BeowulfAt various times, I have asked myself what reasonsmoved me to study, while my night came down,without particular hope of satisfaction,the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.Used up by the years, my memoryloses its grip on words that I have vainlyrepeated and repeated. My life in the same wayweaves and unweaves its weary history.Then I tell myself: it must be that the soulhas some secret, sufficient way of knowingthat it is immortal, that its vast, encompassingcircle can take in all, can accomplish all.Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
7. "We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now."
Author: Julie Taymor
8. "Sully's, on South Prospect, was the quintessential biker-bar, complete with hefty, leather-clad Harley worshippers, and stringy-haired heroin-addicted women who made the rounds among the bikers. Its décor was decidedly Medieval Garage Sale, with a dose of Americana thrown in. An old motorcycle carcass dangled from the vaulted section of the beamed ceiling, and the wood plank floors were littered with butts, scarred by bottle caps and splattered with homogenized bodily fluids. The only light to be had was from neon, dying sconces, and lit cigarettes. Various medieval swords perched on each wall, reminiscent of the times of Beowulf and Fire Dragons on the Barrow."
Author: Kelli Jae Baeli
9. "It's patterns," he said. "If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama anymore. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?"
Author: Neil Gaiman
10. "Working with Scorsese was an absolute dream, and one of my favourite ever jobs was 'Beowulf' because it was just pure acting. Your imagination explodes as you try to imagine you're fighting a dragon or whatever."
Author: Ray Winstone
11. "Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning 'to know'. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce."
Author: Ronald Carter
12. "In 'Beowulf,' director Robert Zemeckis uses a technique called 'motion capture' to conjure fantastical things, angles into action and sweeping vistas to stun your eyes and take your breath away. But what he hasn't mastered and what the technique can't do is this: emotion capture."
Author: Stephen Hunter
13. "Just don't take any class where you have to read BEOWULF."
Author: Woody Allen

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We all get stuck. We all lose ourselves a little bit in a fantasy or in our jobs and forget how we feel about other things. It's really important to check yourself, to spend some time alone."
Author: Amanda Seyfried

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