Haynes Quotes

When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.

It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialised as much as any other person.

A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?

But this is a women's war, just as much as it is the men's, and the poet will look upon their pain - the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men - and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

Who could love a coward?' She had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse.

He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?

Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield.

Why would anyone love a monster?' asked Perseus. 'Who are you to decide who is worthy of love?' said Hermes. 'I mean, I wasn't...' 'And who are you to decide who is a monster?' added the messenger god.

When women take up space, there is less available for men. But it means we get a whole story instead of half of one.

Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.

There’s comfort in stories which don’t change, even the sad ones.

And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved.

Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.

This isn't normal. This isn't how normal people think. Fuck off, world- what the hell is normal anyway?

And if history has taught us anything, it is that women making a noise – whether speaking or shouting – tend to be viewed as intrinsically disruptive.

Men will tell you that Gorgons are monsters, but men are fools. They cannot comprehend any beauty beyond what they can see. And what they see is a tiny part of what there is.

Sing, Muse," he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death. And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold.

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.

Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were.

It's important that you know this because he will try to claim there was a battle. But there is no battle to be had between an armed man and a sleeping girl. Don't forget.

Sad heart. Poor heart. Never stood a chance heart.

I do not mean it when I tell someone "goodbye.

For my mum, who has always thought that a woman with an axe was more interesting than a princess

Because really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas?

She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.

I’m wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Gorgons are both these things, certainly, although Medusa wasn’t always. Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty.

You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you - like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually.

But these myths are full of violence and we should at least ask why it is the violence against women that is removed in order to make our heroes uncomplicated adventurers.

One step at a time is enough for me. Impatience is simply a way of beating yourself up. (from Kammy haynes)

The people's government, made for the people, made by the people and answerable to the people. January 1830

If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.

I feel like becoming the monster he made.

Not every story leaves the teller unharmed.

But when a city was sacked, everything within it was destroyed, right down to its words.

You aren’t monsters,’ Medusa said. ‘Neither are you. Who decides what is a monster?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Medusa. ‘Men, I suppose.’ ‘So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our teeth, our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters.

He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.

Why should the past be any guarantee of the future?

You hate him for turning you inside of yourself. You are still getting used to looking at your body in the light.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds; it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind.

You can't prove what you believe,' she said. 'You can only believe it.

That is what mortals do: first they ask, then they beg, finally they bargain.

Learn how to be lonely. Learn what it’s like to know that you are coming home to yourself night after night- that empty is just another word for open.

There is one question that devours me still. Why didn’t I close my eyes?

Their stories should be read, seen, heard in all their difficult, messy, murderous detail. They aren’t simple, because nothing interesting is simple.

She is my hesitation when people ask me if I have a sister.

A name can be in lots of places at once, she replies. A person can’t.

But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted.

A beautiful woman whom men find all the more alluring because she is essentially mute? I know, I always think the shock will kill me too.

Medusa wasn't always a monster, Helen of Troy wasn't always an adulterer, Pandora wasn't ever a villain.

He thinks anyone who is not like him is a monster: have you noticed? And any monster needs killing.

heroism is something that can reside in all of us, particularly if circumstances push it to the fore. It doesn’t belong to men, any more than the tragic consequences of war belong to women. Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life.

They will fear you and flee you and call you a monster, just like they do your sisters.' 'It doesn't matter what they think of me.' 'Then why do you want to protect them?' 'Because I can,' she said.

I only believe in the easy things, like red lipstick and coffee before noon and writing essays in pen. I make my mind up about boys and then I unmake it, compare us to continental drift, two ships passing. I hit the snooze button too often. Write disposable poems on napkins and old homework, try to discipline myself when it comes to removing my makeup before bed. I am trying to understand men better, cut them some slack, write about them less. I dream about oceans and mountains and wolves. I do not always love myself. I do not always forgive myself. I write apology letters and do not send them. Usually, I do not mean it when I tell someone goodbye.

The sea gods keep their secrets deep; they always have.

Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!

That before-and-after-feel, as though this was going to be the end of one time and the beginning of another.

She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.

Mortals are all the same,' she said to her sisters. 'They think their concerns are everyone's concerns.

Then why do you protect them?” “Because I can,” she said

I’ll bring boys home if I haven’t cleaned my apartment. I’ll let them see the dishes in my sink, the mascara rubbed into my pillowcases, my unswept floors. Think, if we are seeing each other undressed and blemished from the sun, what is a dirty fork?

Trust your instincts, love with your whole heart, forgive, and never take anything for granted.

And I said, ‘I’m thinkin’ I’ve wasted too much time thinkin’, is what I’m thinkin'.

As my English teacher used to tell me, if you can´t think of the right thing to say, say nothing at all.

Kings are often arrogant men.' Clytemnestra said. 'It is what reminds the rest of us that they are kings.

They care about me and protect me. That is beauty.

Amazons – even when one is exceptional – are a team, a tribe, a gang, and it is this which Buffy captured so perfectly: an ensemble of women fighting to save us all.

Euryale liked humans...She liked the way they were so prone to anxiety and haste.

The message is simple: women are stronger together than apart, even ones with superpowers.

I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight.

Mankind was just so impossibly heavy. There were so many of them and they showed no sign of halting their endless reproduction. Stop, she wanted to cry out, please stop. You cannot all fit on the space between the oceans, you cannot grow enough food on the land beneath the mountains. You cannot graze enough livestock on the grasses around your cities, you cannot build enough homes on the peaks of your hills. You must stop, so that I can rest beneath your ever-increasing weight. She wept fat tears as she heard the cries of newborn children. No more, she said to herself. No more.

Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards. Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth. We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.

I know when you talk of beauty you mean something different from what I mean.’ ‘I see.’ He took a step towards her, and she forced herself not to take a step back. ‘So what do you mean by beauty, little Gorgon?’ ‘Euryale tends every one of her sheep like it is a child. Sthenno learned to cook so she could feed me when I was little. They care about me and protect me. That is beauty.

She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

What happened to her?’ ‘You got her pregnant.’ ‘Marvellous. Will I have a new demi-god roaming the earth?’ ‘You already do.’ ‘That’s wonderful.’ ‘He’s about to drown.’ ‘Oh. Let me—

You think you know now, don't you? But you have no idea what it was like.

But a lot of water has passed under a lot of bridges now, and I don´t know if that is something I could do.

No one could help being afraid of something. And being afraid of dying must be especially awful, because there was no hope of avoiding it.

Would it kill you to be sympathetic about someone who isn't as fortunate as you are? Would it?

Power is something you can control,’ Sthenno said. ‘Medusa can turn anything to stone, yes. But she can’t not do it, if she doesn’t want to.

Our gods are conveniently like us, he would say, and why should they be? No answer I offered to this question ever satisfied him, until I gave in and said it must be because we invented them.

Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.

There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet that is determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea hypothesis.

If you hurt her, she will make you regret it. Her revenge will exceed your original wrong and no one will ever be able to say of her that she let her enemies get away with something.

Gorgons aren’t supposed to be like gods. We belong here, in the place between the land and the sea, not on a lofty mountain. They put our image on the outside of temples, not within. We look out on mortals, not down on them.

I dreamed of death the way previously I'd dreamed of the pain leaving me, and the way before that I'd dreamed of gardens and children and weekends away. Death was my elusive lover, treasured and longed for and jealously guarded, and always distant. Always out of reach.

And while I am all in favour of using precision to describe something, might I suggest that you would be better off not doing something so dangerous so often that you need a specific word for it? Perhaps develop your self-control rather than your vocabulary.

In the small hours of the morning, when men and women whispered their secret prayers, they were to her. They begged not for health and long life, as they did during daylight hours. They begged for the blinding, deafening force of lust to be visited upon them, and they begged for reciprocation

My sister compares her body to a junkyard and I find bits of scrap metal beneath her bed from boys who bury promises in her belly. Maybe love ruins you a little bit. Maybe we don’t care. We are so young to hate everything so much. Can recite the periodic table from memory but still can’t quite believe it when they say that they love us, too.

When she blew into the top of it, the reed made exactly the penetrating scream she demanded. Musicians - satyrs, in the first instance - would come along later and bend the instrument to their talent, creating the far sweeter sound we associate with the flute today. But Athene was no musician, and nor was she looking to play a tune. The first flute therefore sounded exactly like what it was. The desperate cry of a reed that has been severed from its root.

How much epic poetry does the world really need? Every conflict joined, every war fought, every city besieged, every town sacked, every village destroyed. Every impossible journey, every shipwreck, every homecoming: these stories have all been told, and countless times. Can he really believe he has something new to say? And does he think he might need me to help him keep track of all his characters, or to fill those empty moments where the metre doesn’t fit the tale?

The strangest thing was that I felt it, I felt everything. Normally I feel nothing but itching, discomfort, tightness, soreness. The surface of my skin is dulled by scars, lots of it is numb -- nerve damage, apparently. When he touched me, I felt everything. It was like having new skin.

I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death. And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?

Certainly not Perseus who – you’ll soon see – has no interest in the wellbeing of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.

I'm wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty. And is a monster always evil? Is there ever such a thing as a good monster? Because what happens when a good person becomes a monster?

No sea god would want to feel so weakened. A shudder ran through Sthenno as she thought of what she had lost: the sweet sense of owning herself and her feelings, of having no concerns at all, or only the very mildest kind. All of this was gone, exchanged without warning for a cold, gripping panic whenever a child stumbled or hid or cried. This, she knew, was love. And she felt it even though she did not want it.

Hope is intrinsically positive in English, but in Greek (and the same with the Latin equivalent, spes) it is not. Since it really means the anticipation of something good or bad, a more accurate translation would probably be ‘expectation’. Before we can worry about whether it’s advantageous to us that it remains in the jar, we first have to decide if it is intrinsically good or bad. This is a genuinely complex linguistic and philosophical puzzle. No wonder it’s easier to just blame Pandora.

These artists tend to show her in the act of opening either a jar or a box, or being about to do so, or in the immediate aftermath of having done so. Their focus is almost always on the destruction which Pandora has wreaked or will imminently wreak, which is surely a consequence of the mingling of the Pandora and Eve narratives. The emphasis in Pandora’s story for centuries has been her single-handed role in the fall of man. Just as Adam and the snake dodge so much of the blame in Eve’s story, so Zeus, Hermes and Epimetheus have been exonerated in almost every later version of Pandora’s. The guiding principle when searching for the cause of everything wrong in the world has been, all too often: cherchez la femme.

Not being bothered to exercise your right to vote is a privilege that many women still don't have. Dismissing politicians as all the same is a luxury. Our votes may not seem very important to us, but our lives without them would be immeasurably worse. For we needed universal suffrage to be firmly and unarguably in place before we could demand equal rights. And while it may be tempting for people to mutter that feminism is old-fashioned, boring and a fight already won, we have have to look at the statistics to see that what is true for women is a very long way short of being true for us all.

Seven simple rules of going into hiding: One, never trust a cop in a raincoat. Two, beware of enthusiasm and of love. Both are temporary and quick to sway. Three, if asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks. He will never ask you again. Four, never give your real name. Five, if ever asked to look at yourself, don't. Six, never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand. And finally seven, never create anything. It will be misinterpreted. It will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life.