Chorus Oedipus Quotes

Prometheus: Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing their doom. Chorus: What cure did you discover for that sickness? Prometheus: I sowed in them blind hopes.

CHORUS: You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him! Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

CHORUS: What canst thou plead? OEDIPUS: A plea of justice. CHORUS: How? OEDIPUS: I slew who else would me have slain; I slew without intent, A wretch, but innocent In the law's eye, I stand, without a stain.

Chorus: 'man after man after man o mortal generations here once almost not here what are we dust ghosts images a rustling of air nothing nothing we breathe on the abyss we are the abyss our happiness no more than traces of a dream the high noon sun sinking into the sea the red spume of its wake raining behind it we are you we are you Oedipus dragging your maimed foot in agony and now that I see your life finally revealed your life fused with the god blazing out of the black nothingness of all we know I say no happiness lasts nothing human lasts

Even harder to admit is how depressed I was. As the social stigma of depression disappears, the aesthetic stigma increases. It’s not just that depression has become fashionable to the point of banality. It’s the sense that we live in a reductively binary culture: you’re either healthy or you’re sick, you either function or you don’t. And if that flattening of the field of possibilities is precisely what’s depressing you, you’re inclined to resist participating in the flattening by calling yourself depressed. You decide that it’s the world that’s sick,, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy. You embrace what clinicians call “depressive realism.” It’s what the chorus in Oedipus Rex sings: “Alas, ye generations of men, how mere a shadow do I count your life! Where, where is the mortal who wins more of happiness than just the seeming, and, after the semblance, a falling away?” You are, after all, just protoplasm, and some day you’ll be dead. The invitation to leave your depression behind, whether through medication or therapy or effort of will, seems like an invitation to turn your back on all your dark insights into the corruption and infantilism and selfdelusion of the brave new Me World.