Thomas Bulfinch Quotes

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

I'm sure you can even find ménage à trois in medieval tales.

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

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.

King Pellinore that time followed the questing beast.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals.

That's really why I wanted to do it. I wanted to be a part of this generation's telling of Camelot, and also get the chance to play a fantastic, complex, interesting, emotionally passionate, young lead role.

Fairy damsels met in forest wide / By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, / Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

C’est moi, c’est moi,’tis I,' I told him. It seemed appropriately melodramatic, though I didn’t know if he’d catch the reference. I shouldn’t have worried. Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Trust you to quote Lancelot rather than Guinevere.

Queen Guenever, for whom I make here a little mention, that while she lived she was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end.

It goes back a long way. I wanted to make Tristan + Isolde as my second movie. My first movie was The Duellists. And I was standing in a very romantic part of France looking around me thinking, "My God, this would be perfect for Tristan," and to cut a long story short it never happened because I did Alien instead.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

love as a passion—it is our European specialty—must absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant, ingenious men of the "gai saber," to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.

You end up with this succession of periods when everything was marvellous - from King Arthur to the medieval times, Ivanhoe, chivalry, Henry VIII, Merry England, the Blitz

Guinevere is not the Morgan type, where she's sultry and she knows she has this incredible female energy that she can use and utilize, and she's not necessarily used to having this power over men.

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.

I've always wanted to play Guinevere. I just asked Chris what he thought, and he steered me in the right directions. We just wanted to make her young and able to make mistakes, which I think is important.

I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.