Quotes about Dante

And all the while one spirit uttered this, The other one did weep so, that, for pity, I swooned away as if I had been dying, And fell, even as a dead body falls.

But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention is given to hell rather than heaven. Dante's Inferno beats out Paradisio every time. Milton's brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of the doomed reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which language of the blessed and saved cannot compete.

But already my desire and my will were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars

As, pricked out with less and greater lights, between the poles of the universe, the Milky Way so gleameth white as to set very sages questioning.