Ariadne Quotes

I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.

What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: However blameless the life we lead, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

I had been a fool to trust in a hero: a man who could only love the mighty echo of his own name throughout the centuries.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.

You told me once that one lifetime of human love was worth the loss.

Ariadne’s light feet crossed and recrossed the circle. Every step was perfect, like a gift she gave herself, and she smiled, receiving it. I wanted to seize her by the shoulders. Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. I said nothing, and let her dance.

It was the women, always the women, be they helpless serving girls or princesses, who paid the price.

I danced for the end of everything I knew and the beginning of everything I did not.

Helen's modest. She wanted to dress herself," Ariadne said, drizzling honey over a bowl of oatmeal and putting it down in front of Helen. "Modest? Sure she is," Hector said sarcastically as he passed Lucas the bacon. "That was YOUR SISTER'S nightgown, wasn't it?" Lucas asked without skipping a beat as he served Helen and himself. Hector wisely shut his mouth. "Yeah," Ariadne replied for him, not getting it. "So comfortable! What? What are you all laughing at?

Mortals may age, but the gods are prisoners of their own infantile whimsies, never capable of change and never knowing what it is to love because they dare not risk the suffering of loss.

When you want something very much, you are willing to accept the shadow of that thing. Even if it is just a shadow.

The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.

So. Ever get the urge to drown anyone?' Ariadne asked. 'No!' Andy replied, horrified. 'Shes just messing with you,' Helen assured her. Her face dropped. 'Seriously, though. What's your stance on strangling?' 'You mean apart from wanting to strangle both of you right now?

Because if I had learned anything, I had learned enough to know that a god in pain is dangerous.

I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness, and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze.

No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women's pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.

Was this my punishment? To live the reality of my dream and find out that its glittering beauty faded to nothing when I stepped close?

Hope is an essential thread in the fabric of all fantasies, an Ariadne's thread to guide us out of the labyrinth ... Human beings have always needed hope, and surely now more than ever.

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us courage to face the Minotaur, and the means then to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?

Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation as I pass. I wander dead-eyed through cities and petrified populations.

Asterion. A distant light in an infinity of darkness. A raging fire if you came too close. A guide that would lead my family on the path to immortality. A divine vengeance upon us all.

The gods do not know love, because they cannot imagine an end to anything they enjoy. Their passions do not burn brightly as a mortal’s passions do, because they can have whatever they desire for the rest of eternity. How could they cherish or treasure anything? Nothing to them is more than a passing amusement, and when they have done with it, there will be another

Because, when you want something very much, you are willing to accept the shadow of that thing. Even if it is just a shadow.

Anna: I will never be with you. We have no future together. None. Do you still want me to kiss you anyway? Ariadne: Yes. Yes.

COBB: Our dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake we realize things were strange. Ariadne gestures around them- ARIADNE: But all the textures of real life-the stone, the fabric... cars... people... your mind can't create all this. COBB: It does. Every time you dream. Let me ask you a question: You never remember the beginning of your dreams, do you? You just turn up in the middle of what's going on. ARIADNE: I guess. COBB: So... how did we end up at this restaurant?

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music.

Why did I, Phaedra of Knossos and Athens, put my faith in a man? When I should have seen that what I truly wanted was simply to run away.

We might only have a mortal lifetime, but it will belong to us, and no one else.

I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

It was only on the way home that Anna realised that Ariadne had asked her to the library and not shown her a single book

It is a delicate thing, training, despite the obvious violence, of course." "You will have to be delicate with me, then," Ariadne said, very softly.

A fallen woman is the sweetest entertainment they know; I saw it before, in Crete. I will not let it happen to me.

ARTHUR: What happened? ARIADNE: Cobb stayed. ARTHUR: With Mal? ARIADNE: No. To find Saito. Arthur looks out at the water below the bridge. ARTHUR: He'll be lost... ARIADNE: No. He'll be alright.

Did you know the world ‘clue’ comes from Greek Mythology? A clew, C-L-E-W, was a ball of yarn. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew to help him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. He unraveled it as he went so he could find his way back.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

My thoughts are slow and ponderous now, rumbling deep in the heart of eternity, but I see the whole of life beneath me.

There were many such stories. It seemed the night skies were littered with mortals who had encountered the gods and now stood as blazing examples of what the immortals could do.

You see? You're not paying close enough attention. Theseus fought for his life," He shook his head. "But the minotaur, he fought for Ariadne.

Bathroom, huh? OK.’ she tittered nervously. ‘I’ll carry you. Just don’t pee on me.’ Helen laughed gratefully. Aridane was making an embarrassing situation as humorous as possible so Helen would feel more comfortable. It was something Claire would have done. Helen was still embarrassed, but with a few jokes and little bit of tact they both made it through.

What I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking.

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing? Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled? And how everything they once were, the spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.

All mortals live and die by the threads they spin - and each mortal shall die when they cut that thread.

The morning sun shone over the bronze blade. There were no more traces of blood left. "Would you believe it Ariadne?" said Theseus "The Minotaur almost didn't defend itself.

The labyrinthine man never seeks the truth but always and only his Ariadne.

They are the cause of their own suffering, and yet they will never see it. They will rage against the gods all day long, and pray to them and plead for their mercy in the darkness of night.

What mysteries remain to be revealed in the nervous system, that web of structures both material and ethereal, that network of threads that runs throughout the body, composed of a thousand Ariadne’s clues, all leading to the brain, that shadowy central den where the human bones lie scattered and the monsters lurk

ARIADNE: Why are they looking at me? COBB: Because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge on you. ARIADNE: Converge? COBB: They feel the foreign nature of the dreamer, and attack-like white blood cells fighting an infection. ARIADNE: They're going to attack us? COBB: Just you, actually.

I avoided my own friends and acquaintances, yet the loneliness of my existence was insupportable.

a terrible picture when viewed from our mortal perspective, like the beauty of a spider’s web that must look so horrifying to the fly.

I had fallen asleep in his arms and woken to cold ashes, a desolate dawn.

You have always known this,” I reminded him. “You told me once that one lifetime of human love was worth the loss.” “I was a fool,” he said.

No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.

In relation to the labyrinth of her heart, every young girl is an Ariadne; she owns the thread by which one can find one’s way through it, but she owns it without herself knowing how to use it.

The word 'clue' derives from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread or yarn. It had come to mean 'that which points the way' because of the Greek myth in which Theseus uses a ball of yarn, given to him by Ariadne, to find his way out of the Minotaur's labyrinth.

The price we paid for the resentment, the lust and the greed of arrogant men was our pain, shining and bright like the blade of a newly honed knife.

She blushed and looked down, and Anna's heart skipped a beat. It wasn't possible, she told herself. There was simply no chance that the Inquisitor's beautiful daughter was … like her

I wonder if the heroes the bards sang of that evening knew before they triumphed what they would become. In those crucial moments when a fateful decision was made, did they feel the air brighten with the zing of destiny? Or did they blunder on, not realising the pivotal moment in which destiny swung and the fates were forged?

Where the bloody hell did you hide my things, you imp?” he demanded. Ariadne gave him a weary but victorious grin. “Your cloak is in the closet inside Dr. Rose’s spare one, which I turned inside out. You looked right past it. As for the boots, one is in the flower box outside and the other is in plain view in my bedroom, which you hate to look at because of the mess.” “Good Lord,” Wendell muttered. “You have your aunt’s devious mind.

I knew that a heroic life would not be without pain and sacrifice, but I thirsted for it all the same . . .

plot is not the story, but an Ariadne's thread you follow through a labyrinth of scenes.

So, Ariadne was the babe with the ball of twine and the plan.

Lord Rameses of Egypt sighed Because a summer evening passed; And little Ariadne cried That summer fancy fell at last To dust; and young Verona died When beauty's hour was overcast. Theirs was the bitterness we know Because the clouds of hawthorn keep So short a state, and kisses go To tombs unfathomably deep, While Rameses and Romeo And little Ariadne sleep.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human. Your criminal is someone who wants to be important, but who never will be important, because he'll always be less than a man

Ariadne gagged but held onto her stomach contents as she relieved the bodies of their guns, a large hunting knife, and two extra bullet magazines that she shoved down the front of her bra. "Should I ask why hide them there?" Asterion said as he watched her. Ariadne gestured to her blood-splattered sundress. "I have no pockets because of the patriarchy, so where else am I going to put them?

It did not feel momentous, yet when I tore my eyes away from his I found that nothing looked quite the same, as though the world had fractured and sheared away from itself to reshape in almost - but not quite - the same formation. As though I had looked at a waterfall and realised with a faint jolt that the water flowing over the rock was ever-changing, that it would never be the same water again.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business.

Life is always dangerous—never forget that. In the end, perhaps, not only great natural forces, but the work of our own hands may destroy it.

We might only have a mortal lifetime, but it will belong to us and no one else.

He was not yet the Minotaur. He was just a baby. He was my brother.

The supernatural seems supernatural. But the science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.

O great Ariadne who pour out your tears On the shore, as you see, out there on the waves, The sail of Theseus flying white under the sun, O sweet virgin child whom a night has broken, Be silent! -Sun and Flesh (Credo in Unam)

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death.

Anna held up a small black-bound memorandum book. Cordelia hadn’t even seen her retrieve it. They strode out of the bedroom, Anna waving the book over her head in triumph. “This,” she announced, “will hold the answers to all our questions.” Matthew looked up, his eyes fever-bright. “Is this your list of conquests?” “Of course not,” Anna declared. “It’s a memorandum book… about my conquests. That is an important but meaningful distinction.” Anna flipped through the book. There were many pages, and many names written in a bold, sprawling hand. “Hmm, let me see. Katherine, Alicia, Virginia—a very promising writer, you should look out for her work, James—Mariane, Virna, Eugenia—” “Not my sister Eugenia?” Thomas nearly upended his cake. “Oh, probably not,” Anna said. “Laura, Lily… ah, Hypatia. Well, it was a brief encounter, and I suppose you might say she seduced me.…” “Well, that hardly seems fair,” said James. “Like someone solving a case before Sherlock Holmes. If I were you I would feel challenged, as if to a duel.” Matthew chuckled. Anna gave James a dark look. “I know what you’re trying to do,” she said. “Is it working?” said James. “Possibly,” said Anna, regarding the book. Cordelia couldn’t help but wonder: Was Ariadne’s name in there? Was she considered a conquest now, or something—someone—else?

People are so proud of their wickedness. Odd, isn't it, that people who are good are never proud of it?

If you had anything that made you proud, that elevated you above your mortal fellows, it seemed to me that the gods would find delight in smashing it to smithereens.

But I’m not a moth. I’m human. And in humans, there are far more stages than just two. I could not have predicted each version of me that I shifted into, but through my history, one constant has always remained true: change itself. I might not be able to return to the other Ariadnes, but I would not always be the Ariadne floating in front of the mirror, either.

ARTHUR: He's out. ARIADNE: Wait, Cobb-I'm lost. Whose subconscious are we going into? COBB: Fischer's. I told him it was Browning's so he'd come with us as part of our team. ARTHUR: (impressed) He's going to help us break into his own subconscious. COBB: That's the idea. He'll think that his security is Browning's and fight them to learn the truth about his father.

Even though she was still so tired she felt glued to the matress, the yelling made Helen's eyes open. She saw Ariadne, Cassandra, and Noel standing over her bed. Correction, they were standing over Lucas's bed and Helen was in it. Her eyes snapped open and her head whipped around to look at Lucas. He was frowning himself awake and starting to make some gravelly noise in the back of his throat. "Go argue someplace else," he groaned as he rolled over onto Helen. He tucked himself up against her, awkwardly fighting the drag of the casts on his legs as he tried to bury his face in Helen's neck. She nudged him and looked up at Noel, Ariadne, and a furious Cassandra. "I came to see how he was and then I couldn't get back to my bed," Helen tried to explain, absolutely mortified. She gasped involuntarily as one of Lucas's hands ran up the length of her thigh and latched on to the sloping dip from her hip to her waist. Then she felt him tense, as if he'd just realized that pillows weren't shaped like hourglasses. His head jerked up and he looked around, alert for a fight. "Oh, yeah," he said to Helen as he remembered. His eyes relaxed back into a sleepy daze. He smiled up at his family and stretched until he winced, then rubbed at his sore chest, no longer in a good mood. "Little privacy?" he asked. His mother, sister, and cousin all either crossed their arms or put their hands on their hips.

ARTHUR: How do we get out once we've made the plant? (to Cobb) I hope you've got something a little more elegant than shooting me in the head like last time. Arthur tilts back in his chair. Yusuf turns to Cobb. COBB: A kick. ARIADNE: What's a kick? Eames slips his foot under Arthur's chair leg. TIPS it- Arthur's legs SHOOT UP INSTINCTIVELY for balance- EAMES: That, Ariadne, would be a kick. COBB: That feeling of falling which snaps you awake. We use that to jolt ourselves awake once we're done.

We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our seventeenth year. But no thread of Ariadne exists to lead us back there.

The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore ‘like the picture of a maenad.’ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. […] Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.

ARIADNE: Do you use a timer? ARTHUR: No, I have to judge it myself. Once you're all asleep in room 528, I wait 'til Yusuf starts his kick... ARIADNE: How will you know? ARTHUR: His music warns me it's coming, then the van hitting the barrier of the bridge should be unmistakable-that's when I blow the floor out from underneath us and we get a nice synchronized kick. Too soon, and we won't get pulled out; too late and I won't be able to drop us. ARIADNE: Why not? ARTHUR: The van will be in free fall. I can't drop us without gravity.

the longing for wisdom itself is wisdom' - 'search for a fixed point within yourself, my child, that the world cannot reach' - regard everything that happens as a lifeless painting and do not let yourself be touched by it,

He is greater than you will ever be. Not because of rank. It’s not a man’s rank that makes him a man. It’s how he treats others. You will never be remembered.

Being in love has a very bad effect on men - it seems to addle their wits.

Feeling like the last two people in the world was thrilling; feeling like the only one was terrifying.

I only hope that wherever we might go, as far away from here as it can be, that we go there together.

I wondered if it was worth it, to defy every law that governed us and lie with a god in a golden bed.

What a pretty dress,” Ariadne said to Cordelia, her voice warm. Her own gown was of flattering wine-colored silk. “I believe that’s the shade they call ‘ashes of roses.’ Very popular in Paris.” “Oh, yes,” Cordelia said eagerly. She’d known so few girls growing up—just Lucie, really—so how did one impress them and charm them? It was desperately important. “I did get this dress in Paris, as a matter of fact. On Rue de la Paix. Jeanne Paquin made it herself.” She saw Lucie’s eyes widen in concern. Rosamund’s lips tightened. “How fortunate you are,” she said coolly. “Most of us here in the poky little London Enclave rarely get to travel abroad. You must think us so dull.” “Oh,” said Cordelia, realizing she had put her foot in it. “No, not at all—” “My mother has always said Shadowhunters aren’t meant to have much of an interest in fashion,” said Catherine. “She says it’s mundane.” “Since you’ve spoken of Matthew’s clothes admiringly so often,” said Ariadne tartly, “should we assume that rule is only for girls?

She looked at nobody, but just before she went out, she raised her eyes and took a speedy glance at me. There was something in that looks that startled me - though it was difficult to describe why. There was malice in it, and a curious intimate knowledge. I felt that, without effort, and almost without curiosity, she had known exactly what thoughts were in my mind.

She did not raise her eyes from the ground, she did not open her mouth to speak. She was no Medusa, wearing her agony in screaming serpents that uncoiled furiously from her head. Instead, she withdrew to an unreachable corner of her soul.

Such is the strange situation in which modern philosophy finds itself. No former age was ever in such a favourable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nonetheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre? And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know. This only shall be said, that they are written for the advantage and encouragement of youthful scholars; for all reckon it an honourable thing to imitate the gods. But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked devils perpetrated these things. And we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire.

Fame has taken the place of religion in the 21st century. The Beyoncés and the Brangelinas of our world filling the void left by the gods and heroes of antiquity. But like most cliches, there's an element of truth to it. And the gods of old were merciless. For every Theseus who slays the Minotaur and returns home in triumph, there's an Ariadne abandoned on the isles of Naxos. There's an Aegeus, casting himself into the ocean at the sight of a black sail...In another life, I like to think that Luc O'Donnell and I might've worked out. In the short time I knew him, I saw a man with an endless potential trapped in a maze he couldn't even name. And from time to time, I think how many tens of thousands like him there must be in the world. Insignificant on a planet of billions, but a staggering number when considered as a whole. All stumbling about, blinded by reflected glory, never knowing where to step, or what to trust. Blessed and cursed by the Midas touch of our digital era divinity.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Anna’s attention was focused on a single patient. Ariadne Bridgestock lay quietly against the white pillows. Her eyes were shut, and her rich brown skin was ashen, stretching tightly over the branching black veins beneath her skin. Anna slipped in between the screens surrounding Ariadne’s cot, and Cordelia followed, feeling slightly awkward. Was she intruding? But Anna looked up, as if to assure herself that Cordelia was there, before she knelt down at the side of Ariadne’s bed, laying her walking stick on the floor. Anna’s bowed shoulders looked strangely vulnerable. One of her hands dangled at her side: she reached out the other, fingers moving slowly across the white linen sheets, until she was almost touching Ariadne’s hand. She did not take it. At the last moment, Anna’s fingers curled and dropped to rest, beside Ariadne but not quite touching. In a low and steady voice, Anna said, “Ariadne. When you wake up—and you will wake up—I want you to remember this. It was never a sign of your worth that Charles Fairchild wanted to marry you. It is a measure of his lack of worth that he chose to break it off in such a manner.” “He broke it off?” Cordelia whispered. She was stunned. The breaking off of a promised engagement was a serious matter, undertaken usually only when one of the parties in question had committed some kind of serious crime or been caught in an affair. For Charles to break his promise to Ariadne while she lay unconscious was appalling. People would assume he had found out something dreadful about Ariadne. When she awoke, she might be ruined. Anna did not reply to Cordelia. She only raised her head and looked at Ariadne’s face, a long look like a touch. “Please don’t die,” she said, in a low voice, and rose to her feet. Catching up her walking stick, she strode from the infirmary, leaving Cordelia staring after her in surprise.

A trinket can be lost,’ he answered. I suppressed the fuming reply I wanted to give. ‘It can be stolen, it can be twisted or tarnished and lose its lustre,’ he went on. ‘I want no gift that I give to you to be so transient. And so I took it from your head, where it can only look dull in comparison to your radiance, and I put it somewhere it will shine forever.’ He cupped my cheek in his hand and lifted my chin to the dark bowl of the night sky. ‘See the new constellation there?’ In the eternity of night, I saw the brand new pinpricks of light that shone in a sweeping arc. The lustre of my crown, now a fiery illumination against the darkness. ‘Just as you will never lose me, you will never lose your crown,’ he murmured, his arms wrapped tightly around me.

Our most heated argument concerned the preponderance of women in my epic and Athene’s ubiquity, and the precedence given to famous women when Odysseus meets the ghosts of the departed. I had mentioned only Tyro, Antiope, Alcmene, Jocasta, Chloris, Leda, Iphimedeia, Phaedra, Procris, Ariadne, Maera, Clymene and, naturally, Eriphyle, and let Odysseus describe them to Alcinous. “My dear Princess,” said Phemius, “if you really think that you can pass off this poem as the work of a man, you deceive yourself. A man would give pride of place to the ghosts of Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Odysseus’s old comrades, and other more ancient heroes such as Minos, Orion, Tityus, Salmoneus, Tantalus, Sisyphus and Hercules; and mention their wives and mothers incidentally, if at all; and make at least one god help Odysseus at some stage or other.” I admitted the force of his argument, which explains why, now, Odysseus first meets a comrade who has fallen off a roof at Circe’s house—I call him Elpenor—and cracks a mild joke about Elpenor’s having come more quickly to the Grove of Persephone by land than he by sea. I also allow Alcinous to ask after Agamemnon, Achilles and the rest, and Odysseus to satisfy his curiosity. For Phemius’s sake I have even let Hermes supply the moly in passages adapted from my uncle Mentor’s story of Ulysses. In my original version I had given all the credit to Athene.

The gods do not know love because they cannot imagine an end to anything they enjoy. Their passions do not burn brightly as a mortal's passions do, because they can have whatever they desire for the rest of eternity. How could they cherish or treasure anything? Nothing to them is more than a passing amusement and when they have done with it, there will be another and another and another, until the end of time itself. Their heroes do not know love because they only value what they can measure - the mountains they make of their enemies' bones, the vast piles of treasure they win and the immortal verses are sung in their name. They see only fame and are blind to the rewards that only human life can offer, which they simply toss aside like trash. They are all fools.

Adelia began to get cross. Why was it women who were to blame for everything—everything, from the Fall of Man to these blasted hedges? “We are not in a labyrinth, my lord,” she said clearly. “Where are we, then?” “It’s a maze.” “Same difference.” Puffing at the horse: “Get back, you great cow.” “No, it isn’t. A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it. It’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death. Labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.” Softening, and hoping that he would, too, she added, “Like Ariadne’s. Rather beautiful, really.” “I don’t want mythology, mistress, beautiful or not, I want to get to that sodding tower. What’s a maze when it’s at home?” “It’s a trick. A trick to confuse. To amaze.” “And I suppose Mistress Clever-boots knows how to get us out?” “I do, actually.” God’s rib, he was sneering at her, sneering. She’d a mind to stay where she was and let him sweat. “Then in the name of Christ, do it.” “Stop bellowing at me,” she yelled at him. “You’re bellowing.” She saw his teeth grit in the pretense of a placatory smile; he always had good teeth. Still did. Between them, he said, “The Bishop of Saint Albans presents his compliments to Mistress Adelia and please to escort him out of this hag’s hole, for the love of God. How will you do it?” “My business.” Be damned if she’d tell him. Women were defenseless enough without revealing their secrets. “I’ll have to take the lead.” She stumped along in front, holding Walt’s mount’s reins in her right hand. In the other was her riding crop, which she trailed with apparent casualness so that it brushed against the hedge on her left. As she went, she chuntered to herself. Lord, how disregarded I am in this damned country. How disregarded all women are. ... Ironically, the lower down the social scale women were, the greater freedom they had; the wives of laborers and craftsmen could work alongside their men—even, sometimes, when they were widowed, take over their husband’s trade. Adelia trudged on. Hag’s hole. Grendel’s mother’s entrails. Why was this dreadful place feminine to the men lost in it? Because it was tunneled? Womb-like? Is this woman’s magic? The great womb? Is that why the Church hates me, hates all women? Because we are the source of all true power? Of life? She supposed that by leading them out of it, she was only confirming that a woman knew its secrets and they did not. Great God, she thought, it isn't a question of hatred. It’s fear. They are frightened of us. And Adelia laughed quietly, sending a suggestion of sound reverberating backward along the tunnel, as if a small pebble was skipping on water, making each man start when it passed him. “What in hell was that?” Walt called back stolidly, “Reckon someone’s laughing at us, master.” “Dear God.