Believe as firmly as if your salvation depended on faith alone; act as if good works were all sufficient.

His greatest if most incomplete achievement, The Canterbury Tales, is a consummation and celebration of all previous English literature. It's "general prologue," and twenty-four separate tales, cover every form from sermon to farce, from saint's life to animal fable, from heroic adventure to full-scale parody. It's twenty-eight characters (including Chaucer himself) furnish an assembly of fourteenth-century people in a medley of occupations and professions. The Divine Comedy has come to earth; The Romance of the Rose has been humanized.

It is the strangest coincidence that Dowland was for some time resident musician at the court of Elsinore, upon whose walls Hamlet walked; melancholy indeed was so favored and so familar a theme that in the late sixteenth century it became an English device for which only the barest signification was necessary. The melancholic was a stock figure of tragedy and even, sometimes, of comedy...There was the melancholic of love, like Orsino sighing for music in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, or the melancholic of learning, who like Hamlet enters reading a book...Childhood is foolish, youth vain; maturity a cause of pain, and old age a cause of mourning. Thus Hamlet becomes one of the central figures of English drama.

Before we arrived, all they did was fish and hunt. That left a lot of land unspoken for, and in the past twenty years lumbermen, miners and homesteaders have been pleased to claim the land as their own. Wouldn't you know the Indians would then turn around and complain that the territory belongs to them and we've got no business being here, even though they weren't using the land for anything much to speak of.

But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.
~Ted Hughes