"Quintessential" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opinion are, in the main, fellow-workers in the craft he practised. His warmest and most constant admirers are his brother novelists. Trollope, to be sure, spoke of him as 'almost a man of genius,' but Trollope's mind was a quintessential distillation of the commonplace, and the man who was on fire with the romance and passion of his own age was outside the limit of his understanding. But amongst the writers of English fiction whom it has been my privilege to know ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... Heaven, Thy crimson-throbbing Glow Into its old abode aye pants to go, And does with envy see Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she Who left the roses in her body's lieu. O, if the pleasures I have known in thee But my poor faith's poor first-fruits be, What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss Then shall be his Who has thy birth-time's consecrating dew For death's sweet chrism retain'd, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... acres of farmland, jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight Gloria's face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find in the other almost the quintessential romance ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... our ankles, we wonder what the world would be like if this were all. Could the human race be acclimatised to this monotony (we say) perhaps emotion would be rarer, yet more poignant, suspended brooding on itself, and wakening by flashes to a quintessential mood. Then fancy changes, and the thought occurs that even so must be a planet, not yet wholly made, nor called to take her place among the sisterhood ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Or those ruby lips, where he Has left strange marks, that show how rough his play! Never, never look to find A faithful heart in him whose rage can harm Sweetest lips, which Venus kind Has tinctured with her quintessential charm. Happy, happy, happy they Whose living love, untroubled by all strife, Binds them till the last sad day, Nor parts asunder but with ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... the agencies that may be made to contribute generously in this high enterprise is history, or more specifically, biography, which is quintessential history. A boy proceeds upon the assumption that what has been done may be done again and, possibly, done even better. When he reads of the beneficent achievements of Edison he becomes fired with zeal to equal if not surpass these achievements. Obstacles do not daunt the boy who aspires. ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have been especially powerful in the ghosts of the men of "wit", Donne, Marvell — erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours, a less "ample ether", a less "divine air", our fathers thought, but poets of "eternity". A quintessential drop of intellect is apt to be in poetic blood. How Platonism fascinates the poets, like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke |
