Ceres Quotes

“the goddess knew that her daughter
had been taken, and tore her hair into utter disorder,
and repeatedly struck her breasts with the palms of both hands.
With her daughter’s location a mystery still, she reproaches
the whole earth as ungrateful, unworthy her gift of grain crops,
and Sicily more than the others, where she has discovered
the proof of her loss; and so it was here that her fierce hand
shattered the earth-turning plows, here that the farmers and cattle
perished alike, and here that she bade the plowed fields
default on their trust by blighting the seeds in their keeping.
Sicilian fertility, which had been everywhere famous,
was given the lie when the crops died as they sprouted,
now ruined by too much heat, and now by too heavy a rainfall;
stars and winds harmed them, and the greedy birds devoured
the seed as it was sown; the harvest of wheat was defeated
by thorns and darnels and unappeasable grasses.”
― Ovid

“...and his analysis proved him to be the first of theoretical astronomers no less than the greatest of 'arithmeticians.”
― W.W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

“Her amazement was compounded as she approached the primary entrance, two stories high. At its apex were the extraordinary sculptures of the goddesses of industry and agriculture, who stood amid the draped folds of their gowns, each flanked by the symbols of her domain. Alice, unlike her uneducated brothers, had grown up with the luxury of reading with her mother. She recognized Ceres instantly, sheaves of grain on her left, her right hand atop an abundant cornucopia. This was the mother who had sacrificed all else to bring her missing daughter home. She thought about how her own mother had sacrificed to send Alice out into what she had envisioned as a better life.”
― Diane C. McPhail, The Seamstress of New Orleans