Boccaccio Quotes

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  • Created by: Alicia
  • Created on: 04-05-15 10:38

Prologue 1 - Boccaccio's Own Experience

"I have been inflamed beyond measure with a most lofty and noble love".

"without the admirable expression of sympathy offfered by friends" (he would have perished).

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Prologue 2- Intentions of Decameron

"I intend to offer some Solace...at least to those who stand in need of it".

"for the ladies...conceal the flames of passion within their fragile breasts".

"they spend most of their time cooped up within the narrow confines of their rooms".

"their power of endurance are considerably weaker than those that men possess".

"I intend to provide succour and diversion for the ladies".

"In reading them, the aforesaid ladies witll be able to derive, not only pleasure from the entertaining matters...but also useful advice".

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Prologue- Boccaccio no longer in love

"Let them give thanks to Love, which in freeing me from it's bounds has granted me the power of making provision for their pleasure".

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Introduction- The Plague

- Tells the story of 2 pigs who died when the rags of a pauper were thrown into the street. The pigs shook them between their cheeks and "began to writhe as though they had been poisoned, then they both dropped dead to the ground".

- "All respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down...Hence everybody was free to behave as he pleased!".

"People almost invariably neglecting their neighbours and rarely or never visiting their relatives, addressing them only from a distance".

"Fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them".

"Nor did she have any scruples about showing him every part of her body...this explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed".

"two priests would be on their way to bury someone holding a cross before them, only to find that bearers carrying three or four additional biers would fall in behind them".

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Introduction- Plague 2

"No more respect was accorded to dead people than would be nowadays to a dead goat".

"huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards....stowed tier upon tier like ships cargo".

- 100,000 died in florence.

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The cornice quotes.

"Every person in this world has the right to sustain, preserve and defend his own life..Here we linger for no other purpose...than to count the number of corpses". Pampinea

"I am filled with foreboding and feel as if every hair of my head is standing on end".

"It is not only of lay people I speak, but also of those enclosed in monastries, who, having convinced themselves that such behaviour is suitable for them and is only becoming in others, have broken the rules of obidence and given themselves over to carnal pleasures". Pampinea.

"women, when left to themselves are not the most rational of creatures, and that without the supervision of some man...our little band will break up much more swiftly". Filomena.

"It is certainly true that man is the head of a woman" Elissa.

palace with delectable gardens, medows, wells of cool water, cellars stocked with wines and the "whole houses adorned with seasonable flowers".

Filomena makes a laurel crown for the King/Queen to wear.

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What is there a variety of?

- Setting

- Times

- Social Classes

- Way of speaking.

THIS IS THE STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLE FOR THE DECAMERON.

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Lisabetta da Messina

"Rather dashing and handsomely proportioned".

"Equally in love with each other">

"But at night she would repeatedly utter his name...and beseech him to come to her".

"Taking the head to her room, she locked herself in and cried bitterly, weeping so profusely that she saturated it with her tears, at the same time implanting a thousand kisses upon it">

"She took to sitting permanently beside this pot and gazing lovingly at it".

"Her brothers expressing their concern at the decline of her good looks, and the way in which her eyes appeared to have sunk into their sockets".

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Day 2, Story 5 - Andreuccio

"Made offers for several of them without however being able to strike a single bargain">

"he kept pulling out his purse, bulging with florins and waving it about it full view of all the paassers by".

"determined to see if she could find some way of relieving him of the whole or a part of his cash".

She devises "an ingenous plan for achieving her object.

"Andreuccio immediately assumed, on looking himself up and down and thinking what a handsome fellow he was,, that the woman must have fallen in love with him".

"firmly convinced that the lady must be nothing less than a genuine aristocrat".

"cunningly prolonged until darkness had completely fallen".

"Oh poor me! What a sudden way to lose five hundred flourins and a sister in one day!".

if its "really true that Sicilians make a habit of discovering blood-relatives and then forgetting all about them, at least give me back the clothes I left there".

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Day 2, Story 5 - Andreuccio 2

"I don't know what restrains me from coming down there and giving you the biggest pasting you've ever had".

"Listen friend...if you hadn't fallen, you can rest assured that as soon as you were asleep you would have been done in".

Archibishop of Naples is "buired with some very valuable regalia and wearing a ruby ring on his finger.

"We'll give you such a hammering over the pate with these iron bars that we'll kill you stone dead".

Priest "What are you afraid of? Dead men don't eat the living, I will go in myself".

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Day 8, Story 3 - Calandrino

Bruno and Buffalmacco were described as a "jovial pair, but they were also shrewd and perceptive...they went about with Calandrino because his simple-mindness and the quaintness of his ways were an endless source of amusement to them".

"mountain made entirely of greated Parmesan cheese" "a stream of Vernaccia wine".

"Pay attention to me; my friends and we can become the richest men in Florence...I reckon we ought to go there right away before anyone else does. We'll find it without a doubt because I know what it looks like"

"Then Buffalmacco asked him what the stone was called but Calandrino being rather dense had already forgotten it's name".

"I can't say I blame him for leaving us like this...What a pair of blockheads we are!".

"All those things lose their virtue in the presence of a woman".

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Nastagio Story Quotes

"the girl he loved was persistently cruel, harsh and unfriendly towards him. And on account possibly of her singular beauty, or perhaps because of her exalted rank, she became so haughty and contemptuous of him that she possitively loathed him and everything he stood for".

"after much weeping and gnashing of teeth, with the longing to kill himself out of sheer despair". ]

"As the young man persisted in wooing the girl and spending money like water, certain of his friends and relatives began to feel that he was in danger of exhausting both himself and his inheritance".

"He caught sight of a naked woman, young and very beautiful, who was running...her flesh was all torn by the briar and brambles...a pair of big, fierce mastiffs were running at the girls heels".

"I loved her far more deeply than you love that Traversari girl of yours...I killed myself in sheer despair with this rapier that you see in my hand, and thus I am condemned to eternal punishment. My death pleased her beyong measure, but shortly thereafter she too died...Everytime I catch up with her, I kill her with this same rapier by which I took my own life, then I slit her back open...I tear from that body, that hard cold heart">

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Nastagio Story Quotes

"So great was the fear engendered within her by this episode, that in order to avoid a similar fate she converted her enmity into love".

"She was ready to do anything he desired">

"They settled down to a long and happy life together">

"Their marriage was by no means the only good effect to be produced by this horrible appariation, for from that day forth the ladies of Ravenna in general were so frightened by it that they became much more tractable to men's pleasures than they ahd ever been in the past".

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