Ashaley Lenora > Ashaley's Quotes

“Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.”
― Edith Wharton, Artemis to Actaeon and Other Verses

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“Venus of Eryx, from her mountain throne,
Saw Hades and clasped her swift-winged son, and said:
'Cupid, my child, my warrior, my power,
Take those sure shafts with which you conquer all,
And shoot your speedy arrows to the heart
Of the great god to whom the last lot fell
When the three realms were drawn. Your mastery
Subdues the gods of heaven and even Jove,
Subdues the ocean's deities and him,
Even him, who rules the ocean's deities.
Why should Hell lag behind? Why not there too
Extend your mother's empire and your own....?

Then Cupid, guided by his mother, opened
His quiver of all his thousand arrows
Selected one, the sharpest and the surest,
The arrow most obedient to the bow,
And bent the pliant horn against his knee
And shot the barbed shaft deep in Pluto's heart.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.”
― Louise Glück

“...a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.”
― Edith Hamilton, Mythology

“Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
("Byzantium")”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

“Life must be bad if my only friend is a giant bat.”
― Joshua Khan, Shadow Magic

“what song of death, what dance of Hades shall I do?”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him. Not by groaning, not by prayers. Yet you run yourself out in a grief with no cure, no time-limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable?”
― Sophocles, Electra

“...even the goddess Persephone is happy, if only for half each year.”
― C.F. Joyce, Persephone in Hell

“A freezing cold underground river. A dark cave lit by ghosts. A man too stupid to realize you loved him. This is what you want?"

"All of it. Especially the very stupid man.”
― Molly Ringle, Underworld's Daughter

“Equilibrium.”
― Kaitlin Bevis, Daughter of the Earth and Sky

“The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.”
― Peter Ackroyd

“What the myth founds is a double existence between the upper world and the underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death.”
― Walter Burkert, Greek Religion

“To Hades with you, fool, for God hath tired of you.”
― Sam Cheever, 'Tween Heaven and Hell

“Lost in Hell,-Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, "My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“Be to her, Persephone,
All the things I might not be;
Take her head upon your knee.
She that was so proud and wild,
Flippant, arrogant and free,
She that had no need of me,
Is a little lonely child
Lost in Hell,—Persephone,
Take her head upon your knee;
Say to her, “My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“We don't expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Persephone barely told anybody anything even when it wasn't a secret.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys

“With love, you don't even need butter on your bread; without it, an elaborate feast is necessary to make you come to the table.”
― Dorothy Whipple, Someone at a Distance

“Aphrodite’s thirst was never quenched; it was cruel and dreamy. It was certainly the most splendid kind of thirst.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Selected Poems and Letters

“If Aphrodite chills at home in Cyprus for most of the year, then Fez must be the goddess’s playground.”
― Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina

“William Shakespeare: My muse, as always, is Aphrodite.
Philip Henslowe: Aphrodite Baggett, who does it behind the Dog and Crumpet?”
― Marc Norman, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay

“Her heart raced with joy to sleep with War”
― Homer, The Odyssey by Homer

“Aphrodite just kept smiling.
Because she was just doing what a goddess does-the same way that a tornado rips houses apart or a fire burns down a forest.”
― L.J. Smith, Spellbinder