Epic Poem Quotes

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.

Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.

'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.

I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

'The Mahabharata,' which inspired my novel 'Palace of Illusions,' also has many stories embedded within the main tale.

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.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

[Beowolf] is considered an epic because of its long speeches, its digressions, its repetition, and its being required.

I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'

I think they went with the idea that people know the story pretty much- knowing that he's going to take her when she's going to go with him. Also, the movie is really focused on Achilles and Hector and their battles.

A book I would take with me to a desert island is 'Paradise Lost,' which I studied in college and hated so much by the end of the class that I never wanted to see it again.

As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seems puny and trivial.

In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.

When Dante described the circles of Hell, he clearly forgot the one where a hungry pixie sits on one's shoulder for eternity.

I read The Odyssey all the time. I always get something out of it.

The well-known inspiration for 'Ulysses' is made clear by the title itself: Joyce's novel is based on Homer's 'Odyssey', under the ever-fascinating premise that all of Odysseus' extraordinary adventures can be experienced by a modern man in a single day, provided that the writing consists of his mental activity.

The Odyssey is the story of someone who, in the course of diverse experiences, acquires a personality or affirms and recovers his personality.