dante

Griff held his breath, waiting for it, knowing the axe would fall and he__ start dying as soon as he walked out the fucking door, and Dante would just grin and joke and try to forget what they had done together in this room.

After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?

The portraits, of more historical than artistic interest, had gone; and tapestry, full of the blue and bronze of peacocks, fell over the doors, and shut out all history and activity untouched with beauty and peace; and now when I looked at my Crevelli and pondered on the rose in the hand of the Virgin, wherein the form was so delicate and precise that it seemed more like a thought than a flower, or at the grey dawn and rapturous faces of my Francesca, I knew all a Christian's ecstasy without his slavery to rule and custom; when I pondered over the antique bronze gods and goddesses, which I had mortgaged my house to buy, I had all a pagan's delight in various beauty and without his terror at sleepless destiny and his labour with many sacrifices; and I had only to go to my bookshelf, where every book was bound in leather, stamped with intricate ornament, and of a carefully chosen colour: Shakespeare in the orange of the glory of the world, Dante in the dull red of his anger, Milton in the blue grey of his formal calm; and I could experience what I would of human passions without their bitterness and without satiety. I had gathered about me all gods because I believed in none, and experienced every pleasure because I gave myself to none, but held myself apart, individual, indissoluble, a mirror of polished steel: I looked in the triumph of this imagination at the birds of Hera, glowing in the firelight as though they were wrought of jewels; and to my mind, for which symbolism was a necessity, they seemed the doorkeepers of my world, shutting out all that was not of as affluent a beauty as their own; and for a moment I thought as I had thought in so many other moments, that it was possible to rob life of every bitterness except the bitterness of death; and then a thought which had followed this thought, time after time, filled me with a passionate sorrow.

we are burning like a chicken wing left on the grill of an outdoor barbecuewe are unwanted and burning we are burning and unwanted we arean unwantedburningas we sizzle and fryto the bonethe coals of Dante's 'Inferno' spit and sputter beneathus andabove the sky is an open hand andthe words of wise men are uselessit's not a nice world, a nice world it's not ...

I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do.

I felt for the tormented whirlwindsDamned for their carnal sinsCommitted when they let their passions rule their reason.

To say she is only a woman is to say a violin is a piece of wood with strings, and Dante is mere ink printed on paper.

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

It illuminated a vision Dante could not have imagined in his wildest nightmares, nor Poe in the grasp of an uncontrollable delirium.

We're our own heroes.

There are worst things in life than kissing boys.

You can quiz me on Petrarch, Medea, Shakespeare or Dante, I know them all, and I__ sorry, but they__e all gone wrong. Dumb glorified men, writing words about love and life as if they knew. As far as I__ concerned, they didn__ make it out alive either, so I__ sure as hell not going to go to them for advice.

I wonder if he__ been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.

He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.

There is no greater sorrowThan to recall a happy timeWhen miserable.

Bourbon, Kentucky bourbon especially, is like Dante__ Inferno in a glass, fire walks down your throat, lungs, and heart and everything in between with an unpleasant after-taste. We got along just fine.

Dante, I think, committed a crude blunder when, with a terror-inspiring ingenuity, he placed above the gateway of his hell the inscription, 'I too was created by eternal love'--at any rate, there would be more justification for placing above the gateway to the Christian Paradise...the inscription 'I too was created by eternal hate'...

...you found me in my lonely labyrinth and like Beatrice, led me out of my own hell...