Ophelia Quotes

“As Hamlet said to Ophelia, ”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we pretend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness, within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power.”
― Emily Thorne

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts...
There’s fennel for you, and columbines; there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died. They say he made a good end,— [Sings.]
“For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
Thought and afflictions, passion, hell itself, She turns to favor and to prettiness.
Song. And will a not come again? And will a not come again? No, no, he is dead; Go to thy deathbed; He never will come again. His beard was as white as snow, Flaxen was his poll. He is gone, he is gone, And we cast away moan. God ’a’ mercy on his soul.”
― William Shakespeare

“Tis in my memory lock'd,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“I always walked the ragged edge.”
― Lisa Mantchev, Eyes Like Stars

“When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

(Ophelia)”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“She kissed his scars, first the one cutting through his eyebrow, then the one cutting into his cheek, and finally the one cutting across his temple. With each contact, Thorn's eyes widened. His muscles, conversely, tightened.
"Fifty-six." He cleared his throat to make his voice less hoarse. Ophelia had never seen him so intimidated, despite his efforts not to show it.
"Thats the number of my scars."
She closed and then reopened her eyes. She felt it again, even more violently, this urgent call from inside her. "Show them to me.”
― Christelle Dabos, La Mémoire de Babel

“we know what we are, but know not
what we may be.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“She had killed and she had liked it, and he surely would have delighted to see her as she was now. Half-mad and fading fast, every inch the Gothic heroine that he’d envisioned. Ophelia, floating dead in the water and haunted by ghosts. Lilith, crafted from the earth instead of as a subjugate of the flesh, drawn to the fiercely blazing beauty of an angel only to find that the brilliant light singed as cruelly as the fires of hell. A fallen woman, drawn to her Lucifer. A cautionary tale to those who refused to bend to the natural order and fell in love with the wrong kind of man.”
― Nenia Campbell, Escape

“Clotilde, Miss Marple thought, was certainly no Ophelia, but she would have made a magnificent Clytemnestra---she could have stabbed a husband in his bath with exultation. But since she had never had a husband, that solution wouldn’t do. Miss Marple could not see her murdering anyone else but a husband---and there had been no
Agamemnon in this house.”
― Agatha Christie, Nemesis

“Lay her i’ the earth;
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring!”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
OPHELIA: 'Tis brief, my lord.
HAMLET: As woman's love.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“There is a willow grows askant the brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead-men's-fingers call them.
There on the pendant boughs her crownet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,
And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Othello, Ophelia and Timon have not committed suicide. Iago, Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes and the society respectively drive them mad and ultimately murder them by using ‘words’ only!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“Broken people can be loved.”
― Joy McCullough, Enter the Body

“For Hamlet, and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute,
No more.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Then, if he says he loves you,
It fits your wisdom so far to believe it
As he in his particular act and place
May give his saying deed; which is no further
Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal.
Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his master importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister.
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough
If she unmask her beauty to the moon.
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes.
The canker galls the infants of the spring
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed;
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are more imminent.
Be wary then. Best safety lies in fear.
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“To the celestial, and my soul's idol, the most beautified
Ophelia.
Doubt thou the stars are fire.
Doubt that the sun doth move.
Doubt truth to be a liar.
But never doubt I love.
O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers.
I have not art to reckon my groans.
But that I love thee best,
O most best, believe it. Adieu.
Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! -
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce
than with honesty?
HAMLET: Ay, truly. For the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd
than the force of honesty can translate beauty
into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox,
but now the time gives it proof. I did love
you once.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET: You should not have believed me. For
virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock
but we shall relish of it. I love you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Go, farewell. Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool.
For wise men know well enough what monsters you
make of them.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I mean country matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That's a fair thought - to lie between maids' legs.
OPHELIA: What is, my lord?
HAMLET: Nothing.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“She speaks much of her father: says she hears
There's tricks i'th'world, and hems, and beats her heart,
Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt
That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing.
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts,
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed, would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it,
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too-much. That we would do
We should do when we would. For this 'would' changes,
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.
And then this 'should' is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“One woe doth tread upon another's heel,
So fast they follow. Your sister's drowned, Laertes.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Give me leave. Here lies the water - good.
Here stands the man - good.
If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he nill he, he goes, mark you that. But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself.
Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“HAMLET: I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Be buried quick with her, and so will I.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“The ‘words’ have the power to kill! They are similar to destructive weapons such as, knives, pistols, bombs and so on.”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“The ‘words’ are so powerful that anyone can drive others mad by using them cunningly. If someone commits suicide after being so hurt by someone else’s words, then it does not remain ‘suicide’ and turns into a ‘murder’!”
― Md. Ziaul Haque