Ann Wroe > Quotes

“According to Augustine, “Eve borrowed sin from the devil and wrote a bill and provided a surety, and the interest on the debt was heaped upon posterity. . . . She wrote the bill when she reached out her hand to the forbidden apple.” And in the end, adds the Golden Legend, “Christ took this bill and nailed it to the cross.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“It was generally believed, said Theophilus, that Orpheus learned his music from the birds. His small voice, piping after theirs, filled with all the secret stories of the earth.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“Standing in the praetorium, planting the barricades of his awkward questions, Pilate becomes the prototype of every uncertain man or woman forced into a dialogue with God. He asks, only half-believing that he will ever get an answer. What comes back is elliptical, disturbing; but for a moment the heart has been laid open.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Pilate also became, in a way, the first priest of the Eucharist of Christ. Christ offered the bread and wine as symbols of his body and blood, but Pilate offered Christ himself. He took him, showed him to the people, proclaimed him and broke him.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“There is never any hint of the crowd splitting into factions; the Gospel writers give them one loud hectoring voice. Some commentators suppose they did this to spread the supposed guilt of the Jews evenly and universally; there were no dissenters.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Restraint allows the tyrant to avoid making martyrs. Martyrs know the truth and, by dying for it, proclaim how strong it is. But if the tyrant toys with the truth, queries it, worries it, refuses to grant its importance and spares men the theatrical satisfaction of dying to uphold it, he remains the strongman and they become the fools.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“our modern day when we can neither endure our vices, nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Because of my underpants?" Ivan asks.
"Chiefly because of Pontius Pilate."

[from Bulgakov's The Master & Margarita]”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“THERE IS NO BEATING THESE PEOPLE, though they seem beatable.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, his head bent to the vibrating string and his lips slightly open, breathing quickly, as over the body of a lover.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“His teachings, said his disciple Musaeus, had one simple theme: 'Everything comes into being from the One and is resolved into the One again.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“in Socrates’ words, he had committed sin by failing to know what was false and what was true.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“We imagine we are free agents, but possibly do not realize how steadily Fate moves us along the road we think we have chosen.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“It was probably a coin of Tiberius with, around the edge, the words TI[BERIVS] CAESAR DIVI AVG[VSTI] F[ILIVS], “Tiberius, son of the divine Augustus,” another son of a god;”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“They went in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but they could not quite manage to be open-minded; for once on the mountain, strange fears began to assail them. Behind their bravely rational and humanist front, they were still men of the Middle Ages, and their climb became a metaphor for the struggle of Renaissance Europe to get past old ghosts.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate

“But godhead gradually slipped away from him, leaving only a sense of election and the power, through his music, to to change landscapes, seasons, hearts.”
― Ann Wroe, Orpheus: The Song of Life

“In the centuries that followed, even up to the twentieth, Christians wishing to blame the Jews seized on this single sentence. They include some of the most venerated men of the Church: Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom. Even if they conceded that Luke’s grammar was ambiguous, they could nonetheless point to the pressure put on Pilate by the chief priests and the crowd. All the Jews, they argued, had killed Jesus. They had even, in Matthew, explicitly taken his blood on themselves and removed it from the Romans. And they had reaped the whirlwind. Every misfortune that subsequently befell the Jews—from the destruction of Jerusalem to Auschwitz—carried an echo of that invented blood pact from the trial.”
― Ann Wroe, Pontius Pilate