Odysseus Love For Penelope Quotes

Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.

Odysseus draped the towel over his shoulders and stretched his back. "You remember practicing with wooden swords? All the moves, the blocks, the counters, getting your footwork right, learning how to be in balance always?" "Of course you were a hard master." "And you recall the first time you went into a real fight, with blood being shed and the fear of death in the air?" "I do" "The moves are the same, but the difference is wider than the Great Green. Love is like that, Helikaon. You can spend time with a whore and laugh and know great pleasure. But when love strikes--- ah, the difference is awesome. You will find more joy in the touch of a hand or the sight of a smile than you could ever experience in a hundred nights of passion with anyone else. The sky will be more blue, the sun more bright. Ah, I am missing my Penelope tonight

His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus.

But Athena had no babe, and she never would. Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as reason.

Love – the love of a soul that learns to fly, to delight in the flight of another – was never on their minds. And so they were never much on mine.

Still, he’d kept up his membership in the Gun Club. Had taken the girls hunting every chance he could. And still went everywhere with Odysseus—having retired Penelope the day they were married, for Georgie was now closest to his heart.

And so, Athene, the prayer I offer is this: thank you for bringing my husband home, if that is what you have done. If the man who sleeps upstairs in the bed he once carved from an old olive tree is an impostor, I suppose I will find out soon enough. He knows the old stories of our marriage, of that I am certain. And Telemachus is devoted to him, which is fortunate. So perhaps it does not matter if he is the man who left, or a changed man, or even another man altogether. He fits in the space that Odysseus left." - Your devoted Penelope

I will always be the other woman. I disappear for a time like the moon in daylight, then rise at night all mother-of-pearl so that a man’s upturned face, watching, will have reflected on it the milk of longing. And though he may leave, memory will perfect me. One day the light may fall in a certain way on Penelope’s hair, and he will pause wildly… but when she turns, it will only be his wife, to whom white sheets simply mean laundry— even Nausikaä in her silly braids thought more washing linen than of him, preferring Odysseus clean and oiled to that briny, unkempt lion I would choose. Let Dido and her kind leap from cliffs for love. My men will moan and dream of me for years… desire and need become the same animal in the silken dark. To be the other woman is to be a season that is always about to end, when the air is flowered with jasmine and peach, and the weather day after day is flawless, and the forecast is hurricane.

Greetings, Antinous,’ I said to him. ‘I wish you’d take that arrow out of your neck.’ ‘It is the arrow of my love, Penelope of the divine form, fairest and most sagacious of all women,’ he replied. ‘Although it came from the renowned bow of Odysseus, in reality the cruel archer was Cupid himself. I wear it in remembrance of the great passion I bore for you, and carried to my grave.’ He goes on in this spurious way quite a lot, having had a good deal of practice at it while he was alive.

Odysseus’s travels involve such a terrific set of adventures that I tend to forget how much of the book is actually about his wife and son—what goes on at home while he’s traveling, how his son goes looking for him, and all the complications of his homecoming. One of the things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s understanding of the importance of what goes on back on the farm while the Hero is taking his Thousand Faces all round the world. But till you get back there with Frodo and the others, Tolkien never takes you back home. Homer does. All through the ten-year voyage, the reader is alternately Odysseus trying desperately to get to Penelope and Penelope desperately waiting for Odysseus—both the voyager and the goal—a tremendous piece of narrative time-and-place interweaving.

Did you know he named his pistols?” she asked. He felt his jaw begin to tick and immediately forced himself to relax. “I think I’ve read that before.” “Well, I just read it recently. As if having a boy pistol and a girl pistol wasn’t bad enough, he goes and names them. Odysseus and Penelope.” She laughed. A full-throated, from-the-belly laugh. “But what can you expect from somebody named Lucious?” Over his four years as a Ranger, he’d traveled seventy-four thousand miles, made two hundred scouts, and one hundred eighty-two arrests. He’d endured cold, hunger, and fatigue without a murmur. He’d been said to have the eyes of a fox, the ears of a wolf, and the ability to follow scent like a hound. Yet this tiny bit of fluff could throw him off-kilter like no other. He counted to ten. “What’s wrong with the name Lucious?” She looked at him, incredulous. “What’s wrong with Lucious? It’s . . . it’s . . . I don’t know . . . silly, don’t you think? Sounds like luscious.” He was named after his father. The father whose life had been senselessly snuffed out by Mother Nature. Carrying his dad’s name was a great privilege and a source of pride for Luke. How dare she make fun of it. Anger simmering, he twisted the wires together and forced himself to respond as if he had nothing personal at stake. “Don’t guess I ever thought about it. Can’t say the name’s ever bothered me, though.” “That’s probably because it isn’t yours. I’m sure if it were, you’d think differently.” “Maybe so.” Picking up a cloth on the switchboard, he wiped his hands. “Did you get a look at this Lucious fellow?” “I did.” He raised a brow. “And was he luscious?” “Ha!” Folding the paper, she tossed it on the desk. “Hardly. If anybody was luscious, it was Frank Comer.

The soldier who led this group – a man of notched chin and significant thigh that under normal circumstances I’d find really quite enthralling – considered this a moment. Then he laid his hand upon my priestess’s shoulder and shoved her – he actually shoved my priestess, upon my sacred hearth! – so hard she lost her footing and half fell, caught by one of the waiting women before she could tumble entirely. Golden nectar splashed around the lip of the bath, spilling in shimmering pools about the white marble floor as I sat upright, the bones of my long, silken hand standing out white. I cursed the soldier who so dared touch my devoted one, barely noticing what I did: he would love and he would bind his heart to passion and when he had given his all, then he would be betrayed. And then genital disfigurement. One does not cross Aphrodite without some thoroughly explicit consequences.

I cursed the soldier who so dared touch my devoted one, barely noticing what I did: he would love and he would bind his heart to passion and when he had given his all, then he would be betrayed. And then genital disfigurement. One does not cross Aphrodite without some thoroughly explicit consequences.

Penelope is at the turning age of life where a woman has either found that sense of herself that makes any creature radiant, beautiful, a splendour to the heart and the eye; or in her flailing and thrashing about for identity has reverted fitfully to some younger time, painting her face with wax and lead and rubbing henna into her hair in the hope perhaps of buying a little more time to learn to love the changing visage she sees in the reflecting pool.

Yet I would far rather they suffer a quick rejection from false desire than the slow heartache of a life lived without truest, purest love.

Earlier times may not have understood it any better than we do, but they weren't as embarrassed to name it: the life force or spark thought close to divine. It is not. Instead, it's something that makes those who have it fully human, and those who don't look like sleep walkers...It isn't enough to make someone heroic, but without it any hero will be forgotten. Rousseau called it force of soul; Arendt called it love of the world. It's the foundation of eros; you may call it charisma. Is it a gift of the gods, or something that has to be earned? Watching such people, you will sense that it's both: given like perfect pitch, or grace, that no one can deserve or strive for, and captured like the greatest of prizes it is. Having it makes people think more, see more, feel more. More intensely, more keenly, more loudly if you like; but not more in the way of the gods. On the contrary, next to heroes like Odysseus and Penelope, the gods seem oddly flat. They are bigger, of course, and they live forever, but their presence seems diminished...The gods of The Odyssey aren't alive, just immortal; and with immortality most of the qualities we cherish become pointless. With nothing to risk, the gods need no courage.

As much as I love what I do and consider it worthwhile, I cannot escape the suspicion that what we do as mental health professionals is not as good as the healing that in other cultures has been rooted in the native soil of the returning soldier's community. Our culture has been notably deficient in providing for reception of the Furies of war into community. For better or for worse, the health care system has been given this role -- along with the prisons, where a disproportionate number of men incarcerated since the Vietnam War have been veterans. We must create our own new models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma. Combat veterans and American citizenry should meet together face to face in daylight, and listen, and watch, and weep, just as citizen-soldiers of ancient Athens did in the theater at the foot of the Acropolis. We need a modern equivalent of Athenian tragedy. Tragedy brings us to cherish our mortality, to savor and embrace it. Tragedy inclines us to prefer attachment to fragile mortals whom we love, like Odysseus return from war to his aging wife, Penelope, and to refuse promised immortality.