Circe Book Quotes

Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.

Any autonomous woman is a candidate for the 'fear-inspiring goddess.' Whether maiden or crone, the autonomous woman is feared as one who can emasculate men verbally as surely as Circe transformed unlucky men into lions and wolves with a tap of her wand. The rigid patriarch seems to fear that autonomous women will transform men into mice.

What is the heart of a library if not a book?

In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, "What is the way to the land of the dead?" Circe answers, "You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off another layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.

The Isle of Pines was Circe's isle, with white marble columns here and there in the dark, green, and pirates would be dueling with a flash of clashing swords and a flash of recklessly smiling white teeth. The Gulf, like the Caribbean, is haunted by the ghosts of the old buccaneers. Tampico, to Pete, wasn't the industrial shipping port his father knew. It had palaces and parrots of many colors, and winding white roads. It was an Arabian Nights city, with robed magicians wandering the streets, benign most of the time, but with gnarled hands like tree-roots that could weave spells. Manoel, his father, could have told him a different story, for Manoel had shipped once under sail, in the old days, before he settled down to a fisherman's life in Cabrillo. But Manoel didn't talk a great deal. Men talk to men, not to boys, and that was why Pete didn't learn as much as he might have from the sun-browned Portuguese who went out with the fishing fleets. He got his knowledge out of books, and strange books they were, and strange knowledge. ("Before I Wake...")

In Circe’s eyes, smile, and emotions, she was entirely connected with herself. She was so easy, honest, and certain of who she was. She was able to express herself in all the ways she desired. She could embrace herself rather than hide, and she could hide, too, if that was what she wanted. She had her whole life to draw whatever picture she wanted others to see and had done these things as if it had become second nature.

You cannot know how frightened the Gods are of pain. For there is nothing so foreign to them. Yet nothing they ache more deeply to see.

in the shadows, enchanter’s nightshade, named for Circe, who changed men into animals with her curse.