Shakespeare in Love quotes

View Quote You see? The consumptives plot against me. "Will Shakespeare has a play, let us go and cough through it."

View Quote [to her Nurse] I will have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love. Love above all. No... not the artful postures of love, not playful and poetical games of love for the amusement of an evening, but love that... over-throws life. Unbiddable, ungovernable - like a riot in the heart, and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. Love - like there has never been in a play.

View Quote Queen Elizabeth: Playwrights teach us nothing about love. They make it pretty, they make it comical, or they make it lust, but they cannot make it true.
Viola De Lesseps: Oh, but they can!

View Quote Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

View Quote Viola De Lesseps: [after her first experience with sex] I would not have thought it: there IS something better than a play!
William Shakespeare: There is.
Viola De Lesseps: Even your play.
William Shakespeare: Hmm?
Viola De Lesseps: And that was only my first try.

View Quote [to Rosaline] Are you to be my muse?

View Quote It is not a comedy I'm writing now.

View Quote Love knows nothing of rank or river bank.

View Quote Love denied blights the soul we owe to God.

View Quote A broad river divides my lovers: family, duty, fate. As unchangeable as nature.

View Quote [to Viola, as they part] You will never age for me, nor fade, nor die.

View Quote [last lines] My story starts at sea... a perilous voyage to an unknown land... a shipwreck... the wild waters roar and heave... the brave vessel is dashed all to pieces, and all the helpless souls within her drowned... all save one... a lady... whose soul is greater than the ocean... and her spirit stronger than the sea's embrace... not for her a watery end, but a new life beginning on a stranger shore. It will be a love story... for she will be my heroine for all time. And her name... Viola.

View Quote I'm fortune's fool!

View Quote I would stay asleep my whole life, if I could dream myself into a company of players.

View Quote [to Will] Good sir? I heard you were a poet. But a poet of no words?