"Epic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... There is no poem or novel that is worth the Memoirs of Saint Helena, although it is written in ridiculous fashion. What I think of Napoleon, if you wish to know, is that, made for glory, he had the brilliant simplicity of the hero of an epic poem. A hero must be human. Napoleon ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... niece a good way in the rear, in her haste to engage the enemy. Before she came up she commenced the action at a long range, and very abruptly—for an effective rhetorician of Aunt Becky's sort, jumps at once, like a good epic poet, in medias res; and as Nutter, who, like all her friends in turn, experienced once or twice 'a taste of her quality,' observed to his wife, 'by Jove, that woman says things for which she ought to ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... of the Gaelic race began to disappear. So strong was this impulse that where the Highlands were concerned men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... of the middle ages culminates in the Christian poet, Dante. History, theology, politics, paganism, sweet and melancholy elegies, flashes of fiery indignation, all men and all generations, meet in his majestic epic. Yet the closest unity is preserved through this astonishing range of subjects; one sublime idea broods over its every line,—the idea of a God ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which every form of craftsman's art was carried. And their work gives us ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
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