Natalie 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Not every story leaves the teller unharmed.

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?

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

I feel like becoming the monster he made.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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—

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.

Euripides was an astonishing writer of women. He wrote more and better female roles than almost any other male playwright who has ever lived.

Yet, in my heart of hearts, I know I have never in my life wanted to eat anything so much as a sachet of silica gel, on which someone has stamped the words ‘Do Not Eat’.

There is peace here, as there always is by the sea. Even for those who have come, as Medusa did, to hate it.

Are they beautiful?' he asked. 'Yes,' she replied. 'Why?' 'Because they are young and happy and together,' she said.

She saw all his vanity and pettiness and wondered why mortals worshipped any god like this.

Men often kill for trophies.

So you're homesick for somewhere you've never been?

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.

Ten years, now, and still Menelaus can neither persuade his wife to come back home, nor accept that he is a red-faced bore and find himself a new wife, one less exacting than Helen.

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.

By the time Sthenno reached her, [Medusa] was completely in darkness again. But the sun shone on the snakes, and it shone on her.

We don't think the sheep have stopped being sheep because we sheared them.

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

Still, Hermes says, 'But here's the thing/To know how it ends/And still begin to sing it again/As if it might turn out this time.' There's comfort in the stories which don't change, even the sad ones.

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.

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.

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?

You're the one who thinks anything that doesn't look like you must be a monster.' 'They have snakes for hair!' Perseus cried. 'Snakes are't monsters,' said Hermes. 'And tusks.' 'Wild boar aren't monsters either.' 'And wings.' 'I'm sure even you don't think birds are monsters.

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.

But Zeus loved her. He was proud of his clever, argumentative daughter, and often took her side in disputes with the other gods. And since Athene would always rather be right than happy, and would rather win than be right, this worked out well for everyone.

there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can’t be faced. There is only an oppressive, creeping dread that the thing no one has told you is too terrible to imagine, and that it will haunt the rest of your life when you find out.

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.

There was something displeasing about mortals, which the gods never spoke about, because they all knew it to be true. They had a strange smell - faint, when they were young, ripening to a stench as they grew old - but always present. It was the odour of death. Even the healthy ones, the uninjured, even children had it, this invisible, indelible mark.

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?

But feeling fear was not the same as lacking courage. Anyone could be brave if he felt no fear. The Trojans murmured that this was true of Achilles, this was why he was so lethal. He rode into battle on his chariot, with no care whether he lived or died. None at all. He cared only for the safety of his friend, for Patroclus

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.

When people ask why tell the stories that we know best from the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, or Circe’s perspective, they presuppose that the story ‘should’ be told from Odysseus’ point of view. Which means the answer to this question should always be: because she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from her?

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.

When the question arises – why retell greek myths with women at their core? – it is loaded with a strange assumption. The underpinning belief is that women are and always have been on the margins of these stories. That the myths have always focused on men and that women have only ever been minor figures. This involves ignoring the fact that there is no ‘real’ or ‘true’ version of any myth, because they arise from multiple authors across multiple locations over a long period.

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.

While we might say that we have fallen in love or developed a crush on someone unsuitable, the Greeks tended to externalize the causes of such experiences. We fall in love, they were struck by an arrow shot by the god Eros, for example. A sophisticated language of psychology simply didn’t exist at the time that Euripides was writing, so things which are internalized for us were often launched upon a Greek from without.

If you're not lonely, then what are you?' The goddess blinked once or twice as she tried to find her answer. 'I helped so many men find their way home,' she said. 'Because they had lost themselves on a quest or in a war and all they wanted was to return home. No matter what adventures they had, what riches they held, what wonders they saw, what they really wanted was to remember those things from the safety of their homes.

The failure of his mission is assured from the moment he undertakes it. There is something cripplingly true about this, isn’t there? That we are so often the authors of our own misfortunes because of the same qualities which makes us brave, or hopeful, or loving in the first place. This Orpheus hasn’t been gripped by madness, he has been afflicted by fear. And because the fear eventually overwhelms him, the thing he feared comes true.

The first time I heard the bard reach this part of the story I thought he would sing that you built a new ship and began to sail home. This should be where the story ends, shouldn’t it? But that is not what he sang next. I demanded to know why. Do you not know where Ogygia is, he asked, his blind eyes moistening. I did not know. Why would any Ithacan have heard of such a place? It took you nine days to drift there, if the poet tells it rightly. So after all the danger you endured, after all the risks you took, I have it on good authority from the poet that you have never been further away from me than you are at this moment.

There are two things to note about this: the first is that in every version of her story, Jocasta becomes a more complex, more rounded character with every word she says. In Oedipus Tyrannos, we get a fairly slender portrait of a woman whose life is entirely dictated by the decisions of men. In The Phoenician Women, we finally hear her talk about what that means and how it feels. And here, in the earlier fragment of the Lille Stesichorus, we have a strong political leader, negotiating with warring parties who happen to be her sons.

I see you. I see all those who men call monsters. And I see the men who call them that. Call themselves heroes, of course. I only see them for an instant. Then they're gone. But it's enough. Enough to know that the hero isn't the one who's kind or brave or loyal. Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — he is monstrous. And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved. This particular monster is assaulted, abused and vilified. And yet, as the story is always told, she is the one you should fear. She is the monster. We'll see about that.