Shelley Quotes

1. "We cannot arrive at Shakespeare's whole dramatic way of looking at the world from his tragedies alone, as we can arrive at Milton's way of regarding things, or at Wordsworth's or at Shelley's, by examining almost any one of their important works."
Author: Andrew Coyle Bradley

2. "... While much recent historicist criticism has assumed early nineteenth-century readers attuned to subtle ideological nuances in poetry, actual responses from readers often come closer to clulessness. ... It is no surprise that no one understood Blake, but other poets fared not much better. ... Coleridge's 'Christabel' was 'the standing enigma which puzzles the curiosity of literary circles. What is it all about?', while another reviewer asked about Shelley, 'What, in the name of wonder on one side, and of common sense on the other, is the meaning of this metaphysical rhapsody about the unbinding of Prometheus?'. Even Keats was condemned for 'his frequent obscurity and confusion of language' and his 'unintelligible quaintness'. Byron, never to be outdone, boasted in 'Don Juan' that not only did he not understand many of his fellow poets, he did not understand himself either: 'I don't pretend that I quite understand / My own meaning when I would be very fine.' ..."
Author: Andrew Elfenbein

3. "Welcome young poet, in here you are free to follow your star to where you should be.That door of the library was the door into meAnd Lorca and Shelley said "Come to the feast."Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East."
Author: Bernard Kops

4. "What Shelley's world of Prometheus Unbound really has to fear is not resurrection of Jupiter but the resurrection of John Donne."
Author: Cleanth Brooks

5. "When Mary Shelley took a local legend based on truth and crafted fiction from it, she'd made Victor a tragic figure and killed him off. He understood her dramatic purpose for giving him a death scene, but he loathed her for portraying him as tragic and a failure.Her judgement of his work was arrogant. What else of consequence did she ever write? And of the two, who was dead - and who was not?"
Author: Dean Koontz

6. "That's how it was on Irving Circle and how I was raised: You made the best out of what was within reach, which meant friendships engineered by parents and by the happenstance of housing. I stayed with it because we both had queenly older sisters who rarely condescended to play with us, because Shelley was adopted and I was not, because Shelley had Clue and Life, and I did not"
Author: Elinor Lipman

7. "A bookseller," said grandfather, "is the link between mind and mind, the feeder of the hungry, very often the binder up of wounds. There he sits, your bookseller, surrounded by a thousand minds all done up neatly in cardboard cases; beautiful minds, courageous minds, strong minds, wise minds, all sorts and conditions. There come into him other minds, hungry for beauty, for knowledge, for truth, for love, and to the best of his ability he satisfies them all...yos...it's a great vocation...Moreover his life is one of wide horizons. He deals in the stuff of eternity and there's no death in a bookseller's shop. Plato and Jane Austen and Keats sit side by side behind his back, Shakespeare is on his right hand and Shelley on his left."
Author: Elizabeth Goudge

8. "The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad."
Author: Erica Jong

9. "... It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness."
Author: Ernesto Cardenal

10. "In English, we were still on the Introduction to Poetry Unit, and I'm not lying, if I ever meet Percy Bysshe Shelley walking down the streets of Marysville, I'm going to punch him right in the face."
Author: Gary D. Schmidt

11. "WATSON: -Sherlock is alarmingly well read.SHERLOCK: -Nothing alarming about it.WATSON: -'The Stray Animal Cook Book' by Alfred Bligh; "An Illustrated Guide to Human Decomposition' by Warren Court; 'How to Kill a Man with Cutlery' by Shelley Von Trampp. I stick by the word 'alarmingly'."
Author: Guy Adams

12. "The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes."
Author: Helen Bevington

13. "I thought of Shelley in the hospital, how she said sometimes sadness only looked like anger and judgment. Maybe fear did too."
Author: Holly Cupala

14. "As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection from that which then I shall be."
Author: James Joyce

15. "Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelleys, the same of Wordsworth and Keats, and a handful of Drydens. Such mass name-changing could have problems in law enforcement. Following an incident in a pub where the assailant, victim, witness, landlord, arresting officer and judge had all been called Alfred Tennyson, a law had been passed compelling each namesake to carry a registration number tattooed behind the ear. It hadn't been well received--few really practical law-enforcement measures ever are."
Author: Jasper Fforde

16. "And women, it turns out, pay a steep economic price for being mothers: according to Shelley Correll, a Stanford sociologist who looks at gender inequities in the labor force, the wage gap between mothers and childless women who are otherwise equally qualified is now greater than the wage gap between women and men generally."
Author: Jennifer Senior

17. "What did she love Shelley for? His reckless spontaneity -- like this. His helpless generous nature -- like this. His treatment of her as a reasonable human being and not a trembling little rose -- and so on. If she loved him for these things, could she hate him for them? Could she?"
Author: Jude Morgan

18. "Stop it, Barry," Joanie said. "Get ahold of yourself. This is just how we work."I agreed. When she told Shelley I was useless, I heard the smile in her voice and knew she was pretending to be irritated. Really, she wouldn't know what to do without my uselessness, just as I wouldn't know what to do without her complaints. I take it back. It's not that we don't treat each other well; it's just that we're comfortable enough to know that sarcasm and aloofness keep us afloat, and we never have to watch where we step."You are both so cold," Barry said that night."
Author: Kaui Hart Hemmings

19. "Haunting the library as a kid, reading poetry books when I was not reading bird books, I had been astonished at how often birds were mentioned in British poetry. Songsters like nightingales and Sky Larks appeared in literally dozens of works, going back beyond Shakespeare, back beyond Chaucer. Entire poems dedicated to such birds were written by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and many lesser-known poets. I had run across half a dozen British poems just about Sky Larks; Thomas Hardy had even written a poem about Shelley's poem about the Sky Lark. The love of birds and of the English language were intermingled in British literary history.Somehow we Americans had failed to import this English love of birds along with the language, except in diluted form. But we had imported a few of the English birds themselves — along with birds from practically everywhere else."
Author: Kenn Kaufman

20. "Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She'd begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley's personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical—the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery."
Author: L.L. Barkat

21. "Well, you've done it now," was her sisterlyopening shot.Jaine rubbed between her eyebrows; a definite headache was forming. After the exchange withDavid, she waited to see where this one was going."I won't be able to hold up my head in church.""Really? Oh, Shelley, I'm so sorry," Jaine said sweetly. "I didn't realize you have the dreadedLimp Neck disease. When were you diagnosed?"
Author: Linda Howard

22. "Okay, let me get a pen." There were rustling noises. "I can't find one." More noises. "Okay,shoot.""You found a pen?""No, but I have a can of Cheez Whiz. I'll write your number on the counter with it, then find a pen and copy it."Jaine recited her number and listened to the spewing noise as Shelley Cheez-Whizzed it on her countertop."
Author: Linda Howard

23. "As individuals, great writers from Villon to Diderot to Voltaire toRousseau to Byron or Shelley have often shown themselves to beirresponsible, selfish, mean or sometimes even cowardly people. Their lives were drab or self destructive or reckless.We read them for their Words, not for their deeds."
Author: Max Vegaritter

24. "I do not mean merely in its adding to enthusiasm that intellectual basis which in its strength, or that more obvious influence about which Wordsworth was thinking when he said very nobly that poetry was merely the impassioned expression in the face of science, and that when science would put on a form of flesh and blood the poet would lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration. Nor do I dwell much on the great cosmical emotion and deep pantheism of science to which Shelley has given its first and Swinburne its latest glory of song, but rather on its influence on the artistic spirit in preserving that close observation and the sense of limitation as well as of clearness of vision which are the characteristics of the real artist."
Author: Oscar Wilde

25. "Phidias and the achievements of Greek art are foreshadowed in Homer: Dante prefigures for us the passion and colour and intensity of Italian painting: the modern love of landscape dates from Rousseau, and it is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England. Byron was a rebel and Shelley a dreamer; but in the calmness and clearness of his vision, his perfect self-control, his unerring sense of beauty and his recognition of a separate realm for the imagination, Keats was the pure and serene artist, the forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite school, and so of the great romantic movement of which I am to speak."
Author: Oscar Wilde

26. "To teach Shelley to be more forceful, I resorted to a method you wouldn't find in any instructional. I made her plan and run a practice. She had to design the workout, set up the drills, push her teammates through them, and decide when something had been done well enough. I never said a word. For a good hour and a half she just stood there and watched. I was drained. Not only do you have to talk, you are in the drill. I just remember being mentally exhausted after that practice. But what a great way to develop leadership and ownership. —SHELLEY SEXTON COLLIER"
Author: Pat Summitt

27. "--Seek far from noise and day some western cave, Where woods and streams with soft and pausing winds A lulling murmur weave?— [_30 Ianthe] doth not sleep The dreamless sleep of death:-Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2011-03-24). The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Complete (Kindle Locations 317-319). . Kindle Edition."
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley

28. "There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas."
Author: Robert Adamson

29. "A kiss can be dreadfully terrifying for the males of our species, I'm afraid." Rose said knowingly. "Sex is easy. All they really need is a few good thrusts. But when they kiss, they open themselves up and let you in. And that, my dear, makes some men's balls shrink to the size of raisins."Shelley snorted with laughter.Dex strode up to her. "Did someone say raisins? I'm starving.""You might try asking Max for some," Shelley said. "I'm sure he has at least two."
Author: Samantha Sotto

30. "Dying is not the real tragedy, Shelley.""It's not?""Forgetting is."
Author: Samantha Sotto

31. "The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart."
Author: Shelley

32. "You're so critical. Oh, God, I'd do anything for you to stop blaming me for every little thing that goes wrong. Love me for who I am. Love Shelley for who she is. Stop focusing on the bad stuff because life is just too damn short."
Author: Simone Elkeles

33. "After I consumed Frost in his entirety, my days of exploration began. I read The Diving Comedy while leafing through E. E. Cummings. I read Sidney and Milton and Shelley, piecing together my own aesthetics, my own defence of poetry. I felt alone and religious and desperately sad."
Author: Spencer Gordon

34. "Might not too much investment in teaching Shelley mean falling behind our economic competitors? But there is no university without humane inquiry, which means that universities and advanced capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. And the political implications of that run far deeper than the question of student fees."
Author: Terry Eagleton

35. "Why is life a constant disappointment?''Because we read fiction,' Mia said, and Shelley nodded, knowing it was true."
Author: Victoria Connelly

36. "... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I want to stretch my faculties on a book, to seek it in that happy age ... when the writer used both sides of his mind [the male and female sides of his mind] equally. One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoy."
Author: Virginia Woolf

Shelley Quotes Pictures