"Picaresque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reduced, that he hardly cared any more. At moments it seemed to him he did not care a straw whether Ursula or Hermione or anybody else existed or did not exist. Why bother! Why strive for a coherent, satisfied life? Why not drift on in a series of accidents-like a picaresque novel? Why not? Why bother about human relationships? Why take them seriously-male or female? Why form any serious connections at all? Why not be casual, drifting along, taking all for what ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... style of Hubert Robert a deserted farm, a clump of storm-riven trees, a dried-up torrent. Evariste Gamelin found a landscape by Poussin ready made on the banks of the Yvette. Philippe Desmahis was at work before a pigeon-cote in the picaresque manner of Callot and Duplessis. Old Brotteaux who piqued himself on imitating the Flemings, was drawing a cow with infinite care. Elodie was sketching a peasant's hut, while her friend Julienne, who was a colourman's daughter, set ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... for form. He writes not as one inspired, but as one steeped in the best literature. Many were greater stylists, but few were endowed with such an exquisite sense of style. As a poet he is a dilettante, and his claim to greatness lies in the brilliant and audacious humour of his 'picaresque novel'. But his verse at its best has a charm and fragrance of its own that is almost unique in Latin, and reveals a combination of grace and facility, to find a parallel for which among writers of the post-Augustan age we must turn to the pages ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... novel is Lodge's romantic story of Rosalynde, which was used by Shakespeare in As You Like It. This was modeled upon the Italian novella, or short story, which became very popular in England during the Elizabethan Age. In the same age we have introduced into England the Spanish picaresque novel (from picaro, a knave or rascal), which at first was a kind of burlesque on the mediaeval romance, and which took for its hero some low scoundrel or outcast, instead of a knight, and followed him through a long career of scandals and villainies. One of the earliest types of this picaresque ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this time, but an aesthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... account of them would be an account of the things he had seen happen to other people. I do not think they had any effect on his own character. He must have acquired experiences which would form abundant material for a picaresque novel of modern Paris, but he remained aloof, and judging from his conversation there was nothing in those years that had made a particular impression on him. Perhaps when he went to Paris he was too old to fall a victim to the glamour of his environment. Strange ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... works of Nash and his imitators, the different parts are badly dovetailed; the novelist is incoherent and incomplete; the fault lies in some degree with the picaresque form itself. Nash, however, pointed out the right road, the road that was to lead to the true novel. He was the first among his compatriots to endeavour to relate in prose a long-sustained story, having for its chief concern: the truth.... No one, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... true idea of the amazing vigor and the artistic inventiveness of the Jugoslav imagination, and also of the various influences, Oriental and Northern as well as Slavic, which have made that imagination what it is to-day. Here are gay picaresque tales of adventure—how they go on and on and on!—charming little stories of sentiment, a few folk tales of stark simplicity and grim humor, one story showing a superficial Turkish influence, and one ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... Rowley was reduced to playing butler in his own house and thereby saving some of the most precious of his curios from the double waste of a spendthrift heir and an unscrupulous lawyer. There was also—need I mention it?—a Circe in the case. It Will Be All Right is an exercise in the picaresque school, lacking none of the author's usual raciness and vigour; but, if at the end we find Mr. Fergus Rowley still unable to reinstate himself, and left with no better consolation than the "Heigho" of his famous great-uncle Anthony, the fault, I feel, was his own. He ought to have looked in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various |
