The Crucible
"Because it is my name!"
"You taught me language, and my profit on't is I know how to curse."
Caliban
“How he has fallen. How
deflated. How reduced.”
Felix
"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
"To keep you from being too depressed, let me emphasise that none of this means that you, personally, cannot find happiness with a good man, a good woman or a good pet canary; just as the creation of a bad female character doesn’t mean that women should lose the vote."
Margaret Atwood
"I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men!"
Abigail Williams
"As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free."
Prospero
“What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon. No: it was like a blizzard. No: it was like nothing he could put into language. He couldn’t face it head-on. He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.”
Narrator
"We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods."
Journey of the Magi
"Now, let’s get back to the notion that in a novel, something else has to happen – other than breakfast, that is. What will that ‘something else’ be, and how does the novelist go about choosing it?"
Margaret Atwood
"Now, by God’s grace, the shining sun is up, and them that fear not light will surely praise it."
Danforth
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't."
Miranda
“What kind of prisons are they? Who’s been put in each of them? And who’s the jailer — who’s put them in, who’s keeping them there?”
Felix
"Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion..."
The Hollow Men
‘I need sentences around me, quotations, the literary equivalent of a cheerleading squad.’
Zadie Smith
"I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you."
Elizabeth Proctor
"I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things, for no kind of traffic
Would I admit. No name of magistrate.
Letters should not be known."
Gonzalo
“Prisons are for incarceration and punishment, not for spurious attempts to educate those who cannot, by their very natures, be educated. What’s the quote? Nature versus nurture, something like that.”
Sal
"Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium."
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
“Lady Macbeth was spotted, Ophelia unspotted; both came to sticky ends, but there’s a world of difference”
Zadie Smith
"I come to do the Devil’s work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head!!"
Reverend Hale
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on: and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Prospero
"He has captured his Miranda, and Ariel has been transformed and accepted. He can sense the rest of his cast emerging as if from a fog, their faces indistinct but present. So far, his charms hold good."
Narrator - Felix's inner dialogue about Anne-Marie
"I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing."
Preludes
"He cannot get this phrase out of his mind: The living and the dead.'
Colum McCann