Quotes about epic
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“Since 1977, there have been many science fiction movies, but none has managed to equal [A New Hope's] blend of adventure, likable characters, and epic storytelling.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/movies/s/sw1.html of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977).
Four star reviews

Calvin Coolidge photo
Vyasa photo

“I think one word we can agree Bob is, uh? Epic, classic. Thriller, block-buster. I think all the clichés were made real. I mean? You woke up this morning, saying you felt nervous about this game. Now, I know why.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

Brazil v. United States http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=ke8XNArZvVU (10 July 2011).
2010s, 2011, 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup

Roger Ebert photo
Jeremy Rifkin photo

“When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VII Further Observations on Homer

Arundhati Roy photo

“He is Karna, whom the world has abandoned. Karna Alone. Condemned goods. A prince raised in poverty. Born to die unfairly, unarmed and alone at the hands of his brother. Majestic in his complete despair. Praying on the banks of the Ganga. Stoned out of his skull.
Then Kunti appeared. She too was a man, but a man grown soft and womanly, a man with breasts, from doing female parts for years. Her movements were fluid. Full of women. Kunti, too, was stoned. High on the same shared joints. She had come to tell Karna a story.
Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened.
Red-eyed, Kunti danced for him. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, Kunti said, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun.
The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, Kunti said, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhirata, a charioteer. And named Karna.
Karna looked up to Kunti. Who was she? Who was my mother? Tell me where she is. Take me to her.
Kunti bowed her head. She's here, she said. Standing before you.
Karna's elation and anger at the revelation. His dance of confusion and despair. Where were you, he asked her, when I needed you the most? Did you ever hold me in your arms? Did you feed me? Did you ever look for me? Did you wonder where I might be?
In reply Kunti took the regal face in her hands, green the face, red the eyes, and kissed him on his brow. Karna shuddered in delight. A warrior reduced to infancy. The ecstasy of that kiss. He dispatched it to the ends of his body. To his toes. His fingertips. His lovely mother's kiss. Did you know how much I missed you? Rahel could see it coursing through his veins, as clearly as an egg travelling down an ostrich's neck.
A travelling kiss whose journey was cut short by dismay when Karna realised that his mother had revealed herself to him only to secure the safety of her five other, more beloved sons - the Pandavas - poised on the brink of their epic battle with their one hundred cousins. It is them that Kunti sought to protect by announcing to Karna that she was his mother. She had a promise to extract.
She invoked the Love Laws.”

pages 232-233.
The God of Small Things (1997)

Douglas Bader photo

“Lucas, Laddie. Flying Colours: The Epic Story of Douglas Bader. London: Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1981.”

Douglas Bader (1910–1982) British World War II flying ace

References

Ray Comfort photo

“It would be far more logical to say that the epic movie BEN HUR happened by accident than to say that there is no God.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

Eric S. Raymond photo

“It has been quite humorous watching the acolytes of the iPhone sink into deeper and deeper denial as Android blows through obstacles at ever-accelerating speed. It would require an epic poet, or perhaps a psychiatrist specializing in religious mania, to do full justice to this topic.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: The Stages of Apple-Cultist Denial http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3132 in Armed and Dangerous (18 April 2011)

Ursula Goodenough photo

“A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story.”

Ursula Goodenough (1943) American biologist

"Exploring The Religious Naturalist Option", 13.7: Cosmos & Culture (23 November 2014) http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/11/23/366104014/exploring-the-religious-naturalist-option
Context: Scientific inquiry has provisioned us with a mind-boggling new core narrative — the epic of evolution, the epic of creation, the universe story, big history, everybody's story — where humans and human cultures are understood to be emergent from and, hence, a part of nature.
Naturalists adopt this account as their core narrative, with full recognition that these understandings will certainly deepen and may shift with further scientific inquiry. They adopt the story currently on offer and do not simply select features of the story that support preferred theories of nature. … A religious naturalist is a naturalist who has adopted the epic as a core narrative and goes on to explore its religious potential, developing interpretive, spiritual and moral/ethical responses to the story.
Importantly, these responses are not front-loaded into the story as they are in the traditions. Therefore, the religious naturalist engages in a process, both individually and in the company of fellow explorers, to discover and experience them. These explorations are informed and guided by the mindful understandings inherent in our human traditions, including art, literature, philosophy and the religions of the world.

Richard Wright photo
Joel Barlow photo

“Despise it not, ye Bards to terror steel'd,
Who hurl'd your thunders round the epic field”

Joel Barlow (1754–1812) American diplomat

Canto 1: st. 1, lines 1–10
The Hasty-Pudding (1793)
Context: Despise it not, ye Bards to terror steel'd,
Who hurl'd your thunders round the epic field;
Nor ye who strain your midnight throats to sing
Joys that the vineyard and the still-house bring;
Or on some distant fair your notes employ,
And speak of raptures that you ne'er enjoy.
I sing the sweets I know, the charms I feel,
My morning incense, and my evening meal,
The sweets of Hasty-Pudding. Come, dear bowl,
Glide o'er my palate, and inspire my soul.

“If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But… our new sources are so rich that we have only begun”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible
Context: If archeology had yielded only the Epic of Kret, we would have enough to bridge the gap between the Iliad and Genesis. But... our new sources are so rich that we have only begun... The years ahead bid fair to be the most fruitful in the annals of Classical and Biblical scholarship. Our debt to the Bible and Classics is so great that this type of research will deepen our understanding of our culture and of ourselves.

Patrick Rothfuss photo

“As far as I can tell, my story is part autobiography, part hero's journey, part epic fantasy, part travelogue, part faerie tale, part coming of age story, part romance, part mystery, part metafictional-nested-story-frame-tale-something-or-other.
I am, quite frankly, making this up as I go.”

Patrick Rothfuss (1973) American fantasy writer

On the progress of The Wise Man's Fear in "Concerning the Release of Book Two" (26 February 2009) http://blog.patrickrothfuss.com/2009/02/concerning-the-release-of-book-two/
Official site
Context: My book is different.
In case you hadn't noticed, the story I'm telling is a little different. It's a little shy on the Aristotelian unities. It doesn't follow the classic Hollywood three-act structure. It's not like a five-act Shakespearean play. It's not like a Harlequin romance.
So what *is* the structure then? Fuck if I know. That's part of what's taking me so long to figure out. As far as I can tell, my story is part autobiography, part hero's journey, part epic fantasy, part travelogue, part faerie tale, part coming of age story, part romance, part mystery, part metafictional-nested-story-frame-tale-something-or-other.
I am, quite frankly, making this up as I go. If I get it right, I get something like The Name of the Wind. Something that makes all of us happy.
But if I fuck it up, I'll end up with a confusing tangled mess of a story.
Now I'm not trying to claim that I'm unique in this. That I'm some lone pioneer mapping the uncharted storylands. Other authors do it too. My point is that doing something like this takes more time that writing another shitty, predictable Lord of the Rings knockoff.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to write a that sort of book. It would be nice to be able to use those well-established structures like a sort of recipe. A map. A paint-by-numbers kit.
It would be so much easier, and quicker. But it wouldn't be a better book. And it's not really the sort of book I want to write.

Ernesto Che Guevara photo

“This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Address to the United Nations (1964)
Context: This epic before us is going to be written by the hungry Indian masses, the peasants without land, the exploited workers. It is going to be written by the progressive masses, the honest and brilliant intellectuals, who so greatly abound in our suffering Latin American lands. Struggles of masses and ideas. An epic that will be carried forward by our peoples, mistreated and scorned by imperialism; our people, unreckoned with until today, who are now beginning to shake off their slumber. Imperialism considered us a weak and submissive flock; and now it begins to be terrified of that flock; a gigantic flock of 200 million Latin Americans in whom Yankee monopoly capitalism now sees its gravediggers.

“Epic poetry is divinely inspired (Iliad I: I) and as such is just as true as oracles, and for the same reason. It is no accident that oracles (such as those at Delphi) were enunciated in the same dactylic hexameter as the epic.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VII Further Observations on Homer <!-- p.224, 1965 paper -->

Ursula Goodenough photo

“Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context.”

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 174
Context: Humans need stories — grand compelling stories — that help to orient us in our lives in the cosmos. The Epic of Evolution is such a story, beautifully suited to anchor our search for planetary consensus, telling us of our nature, our place, our context. Moreover, responses to this story — what we are calling religious naturalism — can yield deep and abiding spiritual experiences. And then, after that, we need other stories as well, human-centered stories, a mythos that embodies our ideals and our passions. This mythos comes to us, often in experiences called revelation, from the sages and the artists of past and present times.

R. A. Lafferty photo

“I will be double-damned to a better Hell than Hellpepper Planet if I will have my ending here in peace! Peace be not the end of my epic!”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Roadstrum, in Ch. 8
Space Chantey (1968)
Context: I will be double-damned to a better Hell than Hellpepper Planet if I will have my ending here in peace! Peace be not the end of my epic! An epic is already failed if it have an ending. I don't care how it ended the first time — it will not end the same now!

“Sarah and Dinah are heroines according to the standards of royal epic.”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Source: The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962]), Ch.VIII Further Observations on the Bible
Context: Once we recognize the factor of royal epic in Genesis, we see that the Helen-of-Troy motif permeates the Patriarchal Narratives.... Like Helen and Hurrai, Sarah and Dinah are heroines according to the standards of royal epic.

Edward FitzGerald photo

“Science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad. The present day teems with new discoveries in Fact, which are greater, as regards the soul and prospect of men, than all the disquisitions and quiddities of the Schoolmen.”

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) English poet and writer

Letter to Edward Byles Cowell, quoted in The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyán (1947) by Alfred McKinley Terhune, p. 146.
Context: Science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad. The present day teems with new discoveries in Fact, which are greater, as regards the soul and prospect of men, than all the disquisitions and quiddities of the Schoolmen. A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista back into time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: and every day turns up something new. This vision of Time must not only wither the poet's hope of immortality, it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.

“That both the Gilgamesh Epic and the Odyssey deal with the episodic wanderings of a hero, would not be sufficiently specific to establish a genuine relation between them. But”

Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001) American linguist

Introduction
The Common Background of Greek and Hebrew Civilizations (1965 [1962])
Context: That both the Gilgamesh Epic and the Odyssey deal with the episodic wanderings of a hero, would not be sufficiently specific to establish a genuine relation between them. But when both epics begin with the declaration that the hero gained experience from his wide wanderings, and end with his homecoming, a relationship dimly appears.... when we note that whole episodes are in essential agreement, we are on firmer ground. For instance, both Gilgamesh and Odysseus reject a goddess's proposal for marriage; and each of the heroes interviews his dead companion in Hades.

James Branch Cabell photo
Daljit Nagra photo
Michael Witzel photo
Vālmīki photo
Vālmīki photo

“Valmiki (14th - 15th century B. C.), the author of the epic Ramayana, bears comparison with Homer.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

Valmiki

Tulsidas photo
Tulsidas photo

“Tuslidas’s attitude toward life and literature was distinctly more objective. Quite naturally, therefore, he has used the objective forms–the epic and the narrative- besides of course, the lyric as vehicles of his devotional poetry.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

K. R. Sundararajan in Hindu spirituality: Postclassical and modern http://books.google.co.in/books?id=LO0DpWElIRIC&pg=PA306&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Bhakti&f=false, p. 73

Tulsidas photo

“Tulsidas was a poor recluse who lived an ascetic life and prompted by an inner light, adapted an old epic in folk-verse which broke all barriers and spread far and wide.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Shiva Kumar Tripathi in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 36

Edward FitzGerald photo

“Science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad.”

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883) English poet and writer

The present day teems with new discoveries in Fact, which are greater, as regards the soul and prospect of men, than all the disquisitions and quiddities of the Schoolmen. A few fossil bones in clay and limestone have opened a greater vista back into time than the Indian imagination ventured upon for its Gods: and every day turns up something new. This vision of Time must not only wither the poet's hope of immortality, it is in itself more wonderful than all the conceptions of Dante and Milton.
Letter to Edward Byles Cowell, quoted in The Life of Edward FitzGerald, Translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyán (1947) by Alfred McKinley Terhune, p. 146.

Chittaranjan Das photo
Stephen M. Walt photo

“Far from making ‘America great again,’ this epic policy failure will further tarnish the United States’ reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”

Stephen M. Walt (1955) American political scientist

Quoted byJulian Borger in US awol from world stage as China tries on global leadership for size, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/29/us-awol-from-world-stage-as-china-tries-on-global-leadership-for-size, Berger followed the quote with the words: Walt wrote in Foreign Policy, in a commentary titled “the death of American competence https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/23/death-american-competence-reputation-coronavirus/”, March 29, 2020

James K. Morrow photo
Susan Sontag photo

“epic ; supreme court rules nabisco is legally allowed to label their products as "Homemade" after forcing the employees to live at the factory”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1288582330261467136]
Tweets by year, 2020

Lynn Shelton photo

“My fascination is with relationships at their most microcosmic. The more epic, the more uninteresting the film-making becomes. It becomes about getting the perfect crane shot.”

Lynn Shelton (1965–2020) American film director, screenwriter, film editor, actress and film producer (1965-2020)

Journalist Tim Teeman's Blog - Lynn Shelton: Hannah, her sister and their lover - 19 June 2012 https://www.timteeman.com/2012/06/19/lynn-shelton-hannah-her-sister-and-their-lover/ - Archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210727184304/https://www.timteeman.com/2012/06/19/lynn-shelton-hannah-her-sister-and-their-lover/

Romila Thapar photo

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Source: Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, p. 100.