Odyssey Quotes

“Throughout our emotional odyssey in the unembellished narrative of our life, we may sense many alluring voices that are enticing us into a beguiling, seamless story. Our inner monologue, however, might start raising consequential questions about the scintillation of that story, about our vulnerability during the tempting process and the danger of losing our real self. The question may be asked, whether the lure might enlighten, weaken or destroy our living. While our interior monologue mostly listens to the wisdom of our experience and the guidance of our memory, it may happen that it prefers not to listen. In that event, however, unreason and passion will be calling all the shots. ( “Woman in progress” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.”
― Homer

“The revelation that I’m destined to meet many virgins from the East and the promise of limitless love they hold in their bosoms gives me strength, fortitude, and tenacity—and the wisdom to know that all three are synonyms.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Like a feather, I let you go. To where you belong.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“Penelope

In the pathway of the sun,
In the footsteps of the breeze,
Where the world and sky are one,
He shall ride the silver seas,
He shall cut the glittering wave.
I shall sit at home, and rock;
Rise, to heed a neighbor's knock;
Brew my tea, and snip my thread;
Bleach the linen for my bed.
They will call him brave.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“As you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that your journey be a long one,
filled with adventure, filled with discovery.
Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
the angry Poseidon--do not fear them:
you'll never find such things on your way
unless your sight is set high, unless a rare
excitement stirs your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
the savage Poseidon--you won't meet them
so long as you do not admit them to your soul,
as long as your soul does not set them before you.
Pray that your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings
when with what pleasure, with what joy,
you enter harbors never seen before.
May you stop at Phoenician stations of trade to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and voluptuous perfumes of every kind--
buy as many voluptuous perfumes as you can.
And may you go to many Egyptian cities
to learn and learn from those who know.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
You are destined to arrive there.
But don't hurry your journey at all.
Far better if it takes many years,
and if you are old when you anchor at the island,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will give you wealth.
Ithaca has given you a beautiful journey.
Without her you would never have set out.
She has no more left to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not mocked you.
As wise as you have become, so filled with experience,
you will have understood what these Ithacas signify.”
― Barry B. Powell, Classical Myth

“I reread the Odyssey at that time, which I had first read in school and remembered as a story of a homecoming.But it is not a story of a homecoming. How could the Greeks who knew that one never enters the same river twice, believe in homecoming? Odysseus does not return home to stay, but to set off again. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved.”
― Homer

“It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Ich las damals die Odyssee wieder, die ich erstmals in der Schule gelesen und als die Geschichte einer Heimkehr in Erinnerung behalten hatte. Aber es ist nicht
die Geschichte einer Heimkehr. Wie sollten die Griechen, die wissen, daß man nicht zweimal in denselben Fluß steigt, auch an Heimkehr glauben. Odysseus kehrt nicht zurück, um zu bleiben, sondern um erneut aufzubrechen. Die Odyssee ist die Geschichte einer Bewegung, zugleich zielgerichtet und ziellos, erfolgreich und vergeblich.”
― Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

“Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Inside it Scylla sits and yelps with a voice that you might take to be that of a young hound, but in truth she is a dreadful monster and no one—not even a god—could face her without being terror-struck. She has twelve mis-shapen feet, and six necks of the most prodigious length; and at the end of each neck she has a frightful head with three rows of teeth in each, all set very close together, so that they would crunch any one to death in a moment, and she sits deep within her shady cell thrusting out her heads and peering all round the rock, fishing for dolphins or dogfish or any larger monster that she can catch, of the thousands with which Amphitrite teems. No ship ever yet got past her without losing some men, for she shoots out all her heads at once, and carries off a man in each mouth.”
― Homer, Homer: The Odessey

“Man is the vainest of all creatures that have their being upon earth. As long as heaven vouchsafes him health and strength, he thinks that he shall come to no harm hereafter, and even when the blessed gods bring sorrow upon him, he bears it as he needs must, and makes the best of it; for God almighty gives men their daily minds day by day.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“We did not get on much further, for in another moment we were caught by a terrific squall from the West that snapped the forestays of the mast so that it fell aft, while all the ship’s gear tumbled about at the bottom of the vessel. The mast fell upon the head of the helmsman in the ship’s stern, so that the bones of his head were crushed to pieces, and he fell overboard as though he were diving, with no more life left in him. “Then Jove let fly with his thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it. The men all fell into the sea; they were carried about in the water round the ship, looking like so many sea-gulls, but the god presently deprived them of all chance of getting home again.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“The Cyclops was no giant. It was a colossal fetus dangling from a throbbing umbilical cord, screaming as he rammed the spear into its slimy eye.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“The sea did not forgive. It throbbed like a living cunt, black and hungry, waiting to swallow the last of us whole.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“He fucked her as her tits burst open with razor teeth, blood and milk spraying across his chest while he came inside the dying monster.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“The lotus was not a flower. It was concentrated god-shit, and they ate it until their minds melted and their bodies begged to be filled.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey, for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life, the one we do not want to hear and will do anything to listen to.”
― Mary Ruefle, The Most of It

“In this dream I am driving
a car, strapped to my seat

like Odysseus to the mast,
my father calling to me

from the back—luring me
to a past that never was. This

is the treachery of nostalgia.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
look like pigs.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“My thoughts are deep
and my memory long; why would I envy such freedom
when I have humanity? Those
with the smallest hearts have
the greatest freedom.”
― Louise Glück, Meadowlands

“She skinned him alive every night, peeling the flesh from his cock while he screamed and came inside her. By morning her fluids made him whole again. And he began to crave the knife.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“The palace walls were no longer stone. They breathed. They pulsed. They opened like wet cunts, hungry for more.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“He ripped the jaw from the suitor’s face and shoved it down the man’s throat, choking him on his own bone while the floor drank their blood.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror

“The Maw did not speak. It sang through every orifice, every wound, every drop of cum and shit we spilled along the way.”
― Jack D. Ace, Ulysses And The Maw Of The Flesh: Odyssey Retold - Mythological Horror