greek mythology Quotes

“But suddenly the world turned sideways. I realized I’d been played with. Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades had been set at each other’s throats by someone else. The master bolt had been in the backpack, and I’d gotten the backpack from . . .”

“Yes. Read The Iliad. It’s full of references to the stuff. Whenever divine or monstrous elements mix with the mortal world, they generate Mist, which obscures the vision of humans. You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.”

“But there is one other important similarity between the schoolboy and ourselves. If he is an imaginative boy he will, quite probably, be reveling in the English poets and romancers suitable to his age some time before he begins to suspect that Greek grammar is going to lead him to more and more enjoyments of this same sort.”

“Rising Crete against their shore appears. There too, in living sculpture, might be seen The mad affection of the Cretan queen; Then how she cheats her bellowing lover’s eye; The rushing leap, the doubtful progeny, The lower part a beast, a man above, The monument of their polluted love.”

“Fierce Juno’s hate, Added to hostile force, shall urge thy fate.”

“Ah, wretched me! that love is not to be cured by any herbs; and that those arts which afford relief to all, are of no avail for their master.”

“And although fire is the antagonist of heat, yet a moist vapor creates all things, and this discordant concord is suited for generation.”

“The Earth received the wild beasts, and the yielding air the birds. But an animated being, more holy than these, more fitted to receive higher faculties, and which could rule over the rest, was still wanting. Then Man was formed.”

“When an impious band madly raged to extinguish the Roman name in the blood of Cæsar, the human race was astonished with sudden terror at ruin so universal, and the whole earth shook with horror.”

“Many a one courted her; she hated all wooers; not able to endure, and quite unacquainted with man, she traverses the solitary parts of the woods, and she cares not what Hymen, what love, or what marriage means.”

“My beauty was the cause of my misfortune.”

“But since thou canst not be my wife, at least thou shalt be my tree; my hair, my lyre, my quiver shall always have thee, oh laurel!”

“Depart from my temple, and cover your heads, and loosen the garments girt around you, and throw behind your backs the bones of your great mother.”

“They say that the Giants aspired to the sovereignty of Heaven, and piled the mountains, heaped together, even to the lofty stars.”

“I must not now employ a lengthened exhortation; pour forth all your might, so the occasion requires. Open your abodes, and, each obstacle removed, give full rein to your streams.”

“I am either deceived, or I am injured.”

“He gave utterance to sighs fetched from the bottom of his heart (for it is not allowed the celestial features to be bathed with tears).”

“They both distrust the advice of heaven; but what harm will it do to try?”

“I wish that I had not been acquainted with the future.”

“I descended from the top of Olympus, and, a God in a human shape, I surveyed the earth. ’Twere an endless task to enumerate how great an amount of guilt was everywhere discovered.”

“But do thou have a care, my son, that I be not the occasion of a gift fatal to thee, and while the matter still permits, alter thy intentions.”

“There is a way on high, easily seen in a clear sky, and which, remarkable for its very whiteness, receives the name of the Milky Way. Along this is the way for the Gods above to the abode of the great Thunderer and his royal palace.”

“Her abode is concealed in the lowest recesses of a cave, wanting sun, and not pervious to any wind, dismal and filled with benumbing cold; and which is ever without fire, and ever abounding with darkness.”

“She both torments and is tormented at the same moment, and is ever her own punishment.”

“His garment was a skin torn from a lion; his weapon was a lance with shining steel, and a javelin; and a courage superior to any weapon.”

“All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.”

“Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest”

“This was a man who moved like the gods were watching: every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector”

“Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother’s lyre. He had brought it with him. ‘I wish I had known,’ I said, the first day when he showed it to me.

‘I almost did not come, because I did not want to believe it.’ He smiled. ‘Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.”

“The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.”

“We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”

“I was thinking about framing, and how so much of what we think about our lives and our personal histories revolves around how we frame it. The lens we see it through, or the way we tell our own stories. We mythologize ourselves.”

“In order to rise from its own ashes a phoenix first must burn.”

“After a chance encounter with Hades, Persephone finds herself in a contract with the God of the Dead... ”