Orestes Quotes

Pylades: I’ll take care of you. Orestes: It’s rotten work. Pylades: Not to me. Not if it’s you.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

One day,' Orest said, looking at him comically, 'you will say something that is less than practical and sensible, something that is driven by no forethought and nothing but passion, and I will probably collapse with shock.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

ORESTES: Never shall I see you again. ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes. ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever. ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home. ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now? ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.

ORESTES: Just to see the outline of your suffering ELECTRA: Yet this is only a fraction of it you see.

PYLADES: I'll take care of you. ORESTES: It's rotten work. PYLADES: Not to me. Not if it's you.

Orestes: How could you recognize me after all these years? Elektra: What a stupid question. I was born knowing you.

Pour everything out for the blood you have shed, you're wasting your time in appeasing the dead.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the alphabet. In that sequence, O and P are inseparable. You might just as well say O and P as Orestes and Pylades. A true satellite of Enjolras, Grantaire lived within this circle of young men. He dwelt among them, only with them was he happy, he followed them everywhere. His pleasure was to watch these figures come and go in a wine-induced haze. They put up with him because of his good humour. In his belief, Enjolras looked down on this sceptic; and in his sobriety, on this drunkard. He spared him a little lordly pity. Grantaire was an unwanted Pylades. Always snubbed by Enjolras, spurned, rebuffed and back again for more, he said of Enjolras, ‘What marmoreal magnificence'.

Orestes beloved. as you die you destroy me. You have torn away the part of my mind where hope was .

Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories.

Because she—you hear her—she's calling, and is always going to call, and it's better both of us die by the dagger without anyone seeing us, Orestes, and die a fit death.

You have used me strangely.

ELECTRA: Oh but my love—now that you have travelled back down all those years to meet my heart, over all this grief of mine, do not oh love— ORESTES: What are you asking? ELECTRA: Do not turn your face from me. Don't take yourself away.

Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax.

Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.

Often the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die.

I am not your king, impudent larva? Who then has created you? Orestes: You. But you should not have created me free.

In Greek mythology, Pallas Athena was celebrated as the goddess of reason and justice.1 To end the cycle of violence that began with Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, Athena created a court of justice to try Orestes, thereby installing the rule of law in lieu of the reign of vengeance.2 Recall also the biblical Deborah (from the Book of Judges).3 She was at the same time prophet, judge, and military leader. This triple-headed authority was exercised by only two other Israelites, both men: Moses and Samuel. People came from far and wide to seek Deborah’s judgment. According to the rabbis, Deborah was independently wealthy; thus she could afford to work pro bono.4 Even if its members knew nothing of Athena and Deborah, the U.S. legal establishment resisted admitting women into its ranks far too long.

Here he lies like something melting away. His mother’s blood comes quaking howling brassing bawling blacking down his mad little veins.

Be happy, beloved face of my great friend. For us that is impossible, but you can be-we dead lack any source of delight

From now on, every ghost who enters the world of the dead will have to come with a story, the story of his or her life, and tell it to the harpies. It doesn't have to be a big adventure; it can just be a description of a day playing with the children, like Lyra's, or whatever it might happen to be. In exchange for this true story, the harpies will lead that ghost outside to dissolve into the Universe and be one with everything else. Of course, I stole that, as I stole everything else! I stole that from the Oresteia -- the bargain Aeschylus's characters make with the Furies that are following them about. "You will be the guardians of this place, and we will worship you and we will give you honor," they say. Then the Furies are satisfied, and they leave off their pursuit of Orestes. There's nothing new in stories. It goes round again and again and again. But that was something that I thought was a good way out for Lyra, and it did reassert the value of story. States it fully and clearly, brings it out. And also the value of realistic story. It's got to be true. And there's a moral consequence; for those who have eyes to see, they can see it: you have to live. You have to experience things to have a story to tell, and if you spend all your life playing video games, that will not do.

They’re a-” “-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.” “They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.” “Tell that to Tipper Gore.” “Who?” Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.” “What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?” “The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly

MENELAOS: What's wrong with you? What sickness wastes you away? ORESTES: Conscience.

I hardly remember, but I remember. There was only sorrow, everywhere fear. (Hermoine to Orestes

One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a “multitude of believers in God.”32 They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter—“a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ”33—surged round and seized “the pagan woman.” They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body and, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the “luminous child of reason” onto a pyre and burned her.34

How far you are from understanding what my intentions are. May fruitful earth refuse to take my blood and the bright sky my spirit, if I ever betray you, if I let myself go free and leave you. I did the murder, too. I don't deny it.

They tried to substitute for Christianity a body of dogmas called “dialectical materialism.” As Orestes Brownson pointed out in 1849, and as Arnold Toynbee has also written, communism was really a kind of caricature of Christianity, borrowing certain of its moral affirmations, imitating its dogmas, and even appropriating some of its phrases. This made communism all the more dangerous: for the superficial similarities between Christian morality and the pretended Soviet morality sometimes deluded Americans and people in other free states into thinking that communism had high moral aspirations.

In Eumenides, Apollo, chosen to represent Orestes in his murder trial, mounts a strikingly original argument: he reasons that Orestes’s mother is no more than a stranger to him. A pregnant woman is just a glorified human incubator, Apollo argues, an intravenous bag dripping nutrients through the umbilical cord into her child.

Of people my own age, friends and relatives, you are my favorite. You're all those things to me

Not to me. Not when I'm looking after you

There’s an old Ukrainian proverb: He who licks knives will soon cut his tongue.

The day I stop scaring you is the day you should leave me.

Remember what the hare said to the hen when he opened the barn door.” She raised her eyebrows. “What’s that?” “With foxes, we must play the fox.

Why does heaven itself oppose me, what stars have ranked themselves against my poor self? (Hermoine to Orestes)

Il n'est point de serpent, ni de monstre odieux, Qui, par l'art imité, ne puisse plaire aux yeux ; D'un pinceau délicat l'artifice agréable Du plus affreux objet fait un objet aimable. Ainsi, pour nous charmer, la Tragédie en pleurs D'Œdipe tout sanglant fit parler les douleurs, D'Oreste parricide exprima les alarmes, Et, pour nous divertir, nous arracha des larmes.

Mentre aspettavo mi guardavo intorno: l'intonaco scabro nella luce, un ciuffo d'erba sul terrazzo contro il cielo, il gran silenzio meridiano. Nello strepito del carro che s'allontanava, pensai che quelli per Oreste erano luoghi familiari, c'era nato e cresciuto, dovevano dirgli chi sa che. Pensai quanti luoghi ci sono nel mondo che appartengono così a qualcuno, che qualcuno ha nel sangue e nessun altro li sa.

Long before the dread monotheists got their hands on history’s neck, we had been taught how to handle feuds by none other than the god Apollo as dramatized by Aeschylus in Eumenides (a polite Greek term for the Furies who keep us daily company on CNN). Orestes, for the sin of matricide, cannot rid himself of the Furies who hound him wherever he goes. He appeals to the god Apollo who tells him to go to the UN—also known as the citizens’ assembly at Athens—which he does and is acquitted on the ground that blood feuds must be ended or they will smolder forever, generation after generation, and great towers shall turn to flame and incinerate us all until “the thirsty dust shall never more suck up the darkly steaming blood ... and vengeance crying death for death! But man with man and state with state shall vow the pledge of common hate and common friendship, that for man has oft made blessing out of ban, be ours until all time.” Let Annan mediate between East and West before there is nothing left of either of us to salvage.

Quanto a me, le storie di vittime e carnefici mi irritavano oltre misura. Forse per questa ragione non avevo mai avuto un amico o un'amica: avevo visto troppe volte, al liceo e altrove, il nobile nome dell'amicizia accostato a oscure schiavitù inaccettabili, a sistemici dispositivi di umiliazione, a nauseanti sottomissioni, fino a comportamenti da capro espiatorio. Avevo dell'amicizia una visione sublime: se non era alla Oreste e Pilade, Achille e Patroclo, Montaigne e La Boétie, perché tu sei proprio tu, e io sono proprio io, allora non la volevo. Se lasciava spazio alla minima bassezza, alla minima rivalità, all'ombra di un' invidia, all'ombra di un'ombra, la respingevo a pedate.

Look at him, look how he drips unhealth—shudder object!

Somos esclavos de los dioses, sean lo que sean los dioses.

What? Am I to be a listener only all my days? Am I never to get my word in—I that have been so often bored by the Theseid of the ranting Cordus? Shall this one have spouted to me his comedies, and that one his love ditties, and I be unavenged? Shall I have no revenge on one who has taken up the whole day with an interminable Telephus or with an Orestes which, after filling the margin at the top of the roll and the back as well, hasn't even yet come to an end? No one knows his own house so well as I know the groves of Mars, and the cave of Vulcan near the cliffs of Aeolus. What the winds are brewing; whose souls Aeacus has on the rack; from what country another worthy is carrying off that stolen golden fleece; how big are the ash trees which Monychus hurls as missiles: these are the themes with which Fronto's plane trees and marble halls are for ever ringing until the pillars quiver and quake under the continual recitations; such is the kind of stuff you may look for from every poet, greatest or least. Well, I too have slipped my hand from under the cane; I too have counselled Sulla to retire from public life and take a deep sleep; it is a foolish clemency when you jostle against poets at every corner, to spare paper that will be wasted anyhow. But if you can give me time, and will listen quietly to reason, I will tell you why I prefer to run in the same course over which Lucilius, the great nursling of Aurunca drove his horses.

La gran prosperidad no es estable entre los mortales. La divinidad, al zarandearla, la rasga de arriba abajo como la vela de una nave rápida y la sumerge bajo penas terribles como bajo las rugientes olas mortíferas de alta mar.

The Archer,” she breathed. “The Scorpion and the Fish … This is a map of my cosmos.” Her boot knocked against a raised half-orb, a screaming face carved into it. “Siph.” The outermost planet. She went to the next, a similar mound with a grave male face. “Orestes.” “Orestes?” Azriel asked sharply, drawing her attention back to where he and Nesta still stood at the tunnel archway. “The warrior?” She blinked. “Yes.” “Interesting,” Nesta said, head angling. “Perhaps the name came from the same source.

I was so wretched that I felt a greater attachment to my life of misery than to my dead friend. Although I wanted it to be otherwise, I was more unwilling to lose my misery than him, and I do not know if I would have given up my life for him as the story reports of Orestes and Pylades: if it is not fiction, they were willing to die for each other together, because it was worse than death to them not to be living together. But in me there had emerged a very strange feeling which was the opposite of theirs. I found myself heavily weighed down by a sense of being tired of living and scared of dying.

Oh wretched one, if thou hast died! from what glorious state, Orestes, and from how envied a sire's fortune art thou fallen! But I reproach the devices of the Goddess, who, if any one work the death of a man, or touch with hands a woman newly delivered, or a corpse, restrains him from her altars, as deeming him impure, but yet herself takes pleasure in man-slaying sacrifices. It can not be that the consort of Jove, Latona, hath brought forth so much ignorance. I even disbelieve the banquets of Tantalus set before the Gods, [as that they] should be pleased with feeding on a boy. But I deem that those in this land, being themselves man-slayers, charge the Goddess with their own baseness, for I think not that any one of the Gods is bad.

But in a horse-chariot they brought [38] me to the sands of Aulis, a bride, alas! unhappy bride to the son of Nereus' daughter, alas! And now a stranger I dwell in an unpleasant home on the inhospitable sea, unwedded, childless, without city, without a friend, not chanting Juno in Argos, nor in the sweetly humming loom adorning with the shuttle the image of Athenian Pallas [39] and of the Titans, but imbruing altars with the shed blood of strangers, a pest unsuited to the harp, [of strangers] sighing forth [40] a piteous cry, and shedding a piteous tear. And now indeed forgetfulness of these matters [comes upon] me, but now I mourn my brother dead in Argos, whom I left yet an infant at the breast, yet young, yet a germ in his mother's arms and on her bosom, Orestes [the future] holder of the sceptre in Argos.

We have come here today for justice. Murder, matricide—these are bleak words and true ones. But there are other truths, too, such as the loyalty that a man would show to a god. The suffering he would endure for him. For eight years, Orestes ignored the will of the gods, to try and protect his mother from a fate that he had not decided, that he did not want. “In our darkest moments, we should recognise not just what has been lost, but who continues to stand beside us. Orestes arrived here in the company of a god, a sister and a friend, and their devotion is unquestionable. Love like that does not come from fear or coercion. He is not an evil man. His deeds were not entirely of his own volition. And, despite everything, I believe his love for his mother remained true to the end. Which is why, in my final ruling on the matter, I find him … not guilty.

Now, as it were, the Olympic magic mountain reveals itself and shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terror and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all, he must have placed in front of him the gleaming dream birth of the Olympians. That immense distrust of the titanic forces of nature, that Moira [Fate]enthroned mercilessly above everything which could be known, that vulture of the great friend of man, Prometheus, that fatal lot of wise Oedipus, that family curse on the House of Atreus, which compelled Orestes to kill his mother, in short, that entire philosophy of the woodland god, together with its mythical illustrations, from which the melancholy Etruscans died off — that was overcome time after time by the Greeks, or at least hidden and removed from view, through the artistic middle world [Mittelwelt] of the Olympians.

The third feature which is of importance for romantic subjectivity within its mundane sphere is fidelity. Yet by ‘fidelity’ we have here to understand neither the consistent adherence to an avowal of love once given nor the firmness of friendship of which, amongst the Greeks, Achilles and Patroclus, and still more intimately, Orestes and Pylades counted as the finest model. Friendship in this sense of the word has youth especially for its basis and period. Every man has to make his way through life for himself and to gain and maintain an actual position for himself. Now when individuals still live in actual relationships which are indefinite on both sides, this is the period, i.e. youth, in which individuals become intimate and are so closely bound into one disposition, will, and activity that, as a result, every undertaking of the one becomes the undertaking of the other. In the friendship of adults this is no longer the case. A man’s affairs go their own way independently and cannot be carried into effect in that firm community of mutual effort in which one man cannot achieve anything without someone else. Men find others and separate themselves from them again; their interests and occupations drift apart and are united again; friendship, spiritual depth of disposition, principles, and general trends of life remain, but this is not the friendship of youth, in the case of which no one decides anything or sets to work on anything without its immediately becoming the concern of his friend. It is inherent essentially in the principle of our deeper life that, on the whole, every man fends for himself, i.e. is himself competent to take his place in the world. Fidelity in friendship and love subsists only between equals.

Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, hic elegos? inpune diem consumpserit ingens Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes? nota magis nulli domus est sua quam mihi lucus Martis et Aeoliis vicinum rupibus antrum Vulcani. Quid agant venti, quas torqueat umbras Aeacus, unde alius furtivae devehat aurum pelliculae, quantas iaculetur Monychus ornos, Frontonis platani convulsaque marmora clamant semper et adsiduo ruptae lectore columnae: expectes eadem a summo minimoque poeta. et nos ergo manum ferulae subduximus, et nos consilium dedimus Sullae, privatus ut altum dormiret; stulta est clementia, cum tot ubique vatibus occurras, periturae parcere chartae. cur tamen hoc potius libeat decurrere campo per quem magnus equos Auruncae flexit alumnus, si vacat ac placidi rationem admittitis, edam.

But American statesmen have studied the constitutions of other states more than that of their own, and have succeeded in obscuring the American system in the minds of the people, and giving them in its place pure and simple democracy, which is its false development or corruption. Under the influence of this false development, the people were fast losing sight of the political truth that, though the people are sovereign, it is the organic, not the inorganic people, the territorial people, not the people as simple population, and were beginning to assert the absolute God-given right of the majority to govern. All the changes made in the bosom of the States themselves have consisted in removing all obstacles to the irresponsible will of the majority, leaving minorities and individuals at their mercy. This tendency to a centralized democracy had more to do with provoking secession and rebellion than the anti-slavery sentiments of the Northern, Central, and Western States.

During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think? Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher. Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way. ‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.

The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, — crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it, — and heedless whether it serves or crushes him. This is the terrible idea that lies at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, and makes the; Oedipus and Antigone and Orestes objects of such hopeless commiseration. They must perish, and there is no over-god to stop or to mollify this hideous enginery that grinds and thunders, and takes them up into its terrific system. (...) But this terror of contravening an unascertained and unascertainable will, cannot coexist with reflection: it disappears with civilization, and can no more be reproduced than the fear of ghosts after childhood. It is discriminated from the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity herein: that the last is an Optimism, and therefore the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a part. But in Destiny, it is not the good of the whole or the best will that is enacted, but only one particular will. Destiny properly is not a will at all, but an immense whim; and this is the only ground of terror and despair in the rational mind, and of tragedy in literature. Hence the antique tragedy, which was founded on this faith, can never be reproduced.

To celebrate the Russian/Ukrainian partnership, in 1954 the 300th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Treaty was marked throughout the Soviet Union in an unusually grandiose manner. In addition to numerous festivities, myriad publications, and countless speeches, the Central Committee of the all-union party even issued thirteen "thesis", which argued the irreversibility of the "everlasting union" of the Ukrainians and the Russians: "The experience of history has shown that the way of fraternal union and alliance chosen by the Russians and Ukrainians was the only true way. The union of two great Slavic peoples multiplied their strength in the common struggle against all external foes, against serf owners and the bourgeoisie, again tsarism and capitalist slavery. The unshakeable friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples has grown and strengthened in this struggle." To emphasize the point that the union with Moscow brought the Ukrainians great benefits, the Pereiaslav anniversary was crowned by the Russian republic's ceding of Crimea to Ukraine "as a token of friendship of the Russian people." But the "gift" of the Crimea was far less altruistic than it seemed. First, because the peninsula was the historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars whom Stalin had expelled during the Second World War, the Russians did not have the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it. Second, because of its proximity and economic dependence on Ukraine, the Crimea's links with Ukraine were naturally greater than with Russia. Finally, the annexation of the Crimea saddled Ukraine with economic and political problems. The deportation of the Tatars in 1944 had created economic chaos in the region and it was Kiev's budget that had to make up loses. More important was the fact that, according to the 1959 census, about 860,000 Russians and only 260,000 Ukrainians lived in the Crimea. Although Kiev attempted to bring more Ukrainians into the region after 1954, the Russians, many of whom were especially adamant in rejecting any form of Ukrainization, remained the overwhelming majority. As a result, the Crimean "gift" increased considerably the number of Russians in the Ukrainian republic. In this regard, it certainly was an appropriate way of marking the Pereiaslav Treaty.

Şimdi Olympos büyülü dağı adeta kendini açıyor ve köklerini gösteriyor bize. Yunanlı, varoluşun korkularını ve dehşetlerini biliyor ve duyumsuyordu: yaşayabilmek için, bunların önüne Olympos'taki parlak düş ürününü koyması gerekiyordu. Doğanın dev güçleri karşısındaki o muazzam güvensizlik, tüm bilgilerin üzerinde acımasızca hüküm süren o Moira, büyük insan dostu Prometheus'un o akbabası, bilge Oidipus'un o korkunç yazgısı, Atreusoğulları soyunun üstündeki, Orestes'in annesini öldürmeye zorlayan o lanet; kısacası, orman tanrısının, efkarlı Etrüsklerin yıkımına yol açan mitsel ibretleriyle birlikte tüm o felsefesi - Yunanlılar tarafından, Olymposluların o sanatsal orta dünyası aracılığıyla sürekli yeniden aşılıyor, her halükarda perdeleniyor ve gözlerden gizleniyordu. Yunanlıların, yaşayabilmek için bu tanrıları en derinden gelen bir zorunlulukla yaratmaları gerekmiştir: Olympos'taki neşeli tanrılar düzeninin, başlangıçtaki dehşetli titanik tanrılar düzeninden, söz konusu Apolloncu güzellik dürtüsü sayesinde, yavaş geçişler halinde gelişmesinin izlediği yolu nasıl mı tasarlıyoruz: dikenli çalılıklarda güllerin açıvermesi gibi. Yoksa, bu kadar aşırı duyarlı, bu kadar delidolu arzulu, böyle eşsiz acı çekme yeteneğine sahip bu halk, nasıl katlanabilirdi varoluşa, aynısını daha yüksek bir şanla çevrili bir biçimde tanrıların da yaşadığı gösterilmeseydi? Varoluşun, yaşamı sürdürmeye ayartan bir bütünlenişi ve tamamlanışı olarak, sanata yaşam veren aynı dürtü, Helen "istenci"nin kendisine ululayıcı bir ayna tuttuğu Olympos dünyasını da yaratmıştır. Böylece tanrılar, kendileri de aynısını yaşayarak haklı çıkarırlar insan yaşamını - tek başına yeterli bir tanrı savunusu!" s.28

[MINERVA appears.] MIN. Whither, whither sendest thou this troop to follow [the fugitives,] king Thoas? List to the words of me, Minerva. Cease pursuing, and stirring on the onset of your host. For by the destined oracles of Loxias Orestes came hither, fleeing the wrath of the Erinnyes, and in order to conduct his sister's person to Argos, and to bear the sacred image into my land, by way of respite from his present troubles. Thus are our words for thee, but as to him, Orestes, whom you wish to slay, having caught him in a tempest at sea, Neptune has already, for my sake, rendered the surface of the sea waveless, piloting him along in the ship. But do thou, Orestes, learning my commands, (for thou hearest the voice of a Goddess, although not present,) go, taking the image and thy sister. And when thou art come to heaven-built Athens, there is a certain sacred district in the farthest bounds of Atthis, near the Carystian rock, which my people call Alœ—here, having built a temple, do thou enshrine the image named after the Tauric land and thy toils, which thou hast labored through, wandering over Greece, under the goad of the Erinnyes. But mortals hereafter shall celebrate her as the Tauric Goddess Diana. And do thou ordain this law, that, when the people celebrate a feast in grateful commemoration of thy release from slaughter, [188] let them apply the sword to the neck of a man, and let blood flow on account of the holy Goddess, that she may have honor. But, O Iphigenia, thou must needs be guardian of the temple of this Goddess at the hallowed ascent of Brauron; [189] where also thou shalt be buried at thy death, and they shall offer to you the honor of rich woven vestments, which women, dying in childbed, may leave in their houses. But I command thee to let these Grecian women depart from the land on account of their disinterested disposition, [190] I, having saved thee also on a former occasion, by determining the equal votes in the Field of Mars, Orestes, and that, according to the same law, he should conquer, whoever receive equal suffrages. But, O son of Agamemnon, do thou remove thy sister from this land, nor be thou angered, Thoas.

A sliver of a man stood on a corner beside a charcoal garage door, a plume of smoke twisting from his hand. He looked more like a shadow than a person, the offspring of Marlene Dietrich and Checkpoint Charlie, born with a genetic predisposition to survive in the catacombs.

Lake Baikal is twenty-five million years old. Its water is so pure you can drink it. It’s filled with organisms that keep it pure. It is home to hundreds of otherwise extinct species, like the only freshwater seal known to man.

IF A MAN lived long enough, he risked becoming what he once hated.

The greatest opportunities presented themselves when all hope was gone.

Most men are fools until they die, and those who aren’t are already dead.

Only idiots brought boomerangs to a gunfight.

No one ever plotted to kill the peasant.

When she got her job on Wall Street, she stopped practicing her religion, which is to say she changed her affiliation to the greenback.

The one thing she knew not to do was drink from the stream. One of the boys had done that last summer camp and ended up in the hospital with a Cryptosporidium parasite and diarrhea for a week.

My brother and I never suffered for anything other than calm. We were nervous all the time. In fact, our nerves remained on alert for the first eighteen years of our lives until each of us left for college. We simply never knew when our father would explode.

When you’re a woman living alone you can’t take any chances. If a burglar sees those shoes, he’ll assume there’s a man inside and he’ll go away. Unless the burglar knows my son and daughter. Then he’ll waltz right in, rob me, and kill me because he’ll know that neither of them stuck around to take care of me.

She’d been up all night baking paska—the special Easter bread—and babkas.

would be the winner. “Why would I wait?” “Because you said you would.” “I said I’d wait before I wrote anything. That didn’t mean

Following the practice of the times, the grand princes and, later, the kings of Poland acquired the right of patronage; that is, they could appoint Orthodox bishops and even the metropolitan himself. Thus, the crucial issue of the leadership of the Orthodox faithful was left in the hands of secular rulers of another, increasingly antagonistic, church… The results were disastrous. With lay authorities capable of appointing bishops, the metropolitan's authority was undermined. And with every bishop acting as a law unto himself, the organizational discipline of the Orthodox church deteriorated rapidly. Even more deleterious was the corruption that lay patronage engendered… Under the circumstances, Orthodoxy's cultural contributions were limited. Schools, once one of the church's most attractive features, were neglected. Unqualified teachers barely succeeded in familiarizing their pupils with the rudiments of reading, writing, and Holy Scriptures. The curriculum of the schools had changed little since medieval times. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 added to the intellectual and cultural stagnation by depriving the Orthodox of their most advanced and inspiring model. Lacking both external and internal stimuli, Orthodox culture slipped into ritualism, parochialism, and decay. The Poles, meanwhile, were enjoying a period of cultural growth and vitality. Benefiting from the West's prodigious outbursts of creative energy, they experienced the Renaissance with its stimulating reorientation of thought.

Донья Инес. По книге! Да разве можно уместить любовь в каких-то строчках! Прочь! В написанных словах нет ни капли правды. По книге, великий Боже! (Она убегает, рыдая, вверх по лестнице.) Капитан. А что плохого в книге? Ее всегда можно отложить в сторону, на любом месте. Занавес

We are standing outside the temple of a goddess,” Tisiphone continued, still in human form. “It was not to a god that mighty Apollo came, for a solution to this problem, just as it would not have been to his father that Orestes would have gone with his troubles as a child. The goddesses, the mothers, they are the ones we turn to. And yet it is a god’s word that we have to obey, one that tells us that a man must be avenged, but not a woman.

And like Orestes, I am polluted by that sin.

I think it was then that I first really saw what lay behind that good-tempered and apparently unruffled self-command of Simon’s; what made it so very different from the more flamboyant self-confidence I had envied. Simon cared. He really did care what happened to this casually-met, troubled, and not very attractive boy who was being so wretchedly rude. And that was why he had come back after fourteen years to find out what had happened to Michael. It was not a present tragedy, and he was not, after all, an Orestes. But he cared—for his father’s sake, for Stephanos’, for the woman’s. ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.’ That was it. He was involved in mankind, and, just at this moment, that meant Nigel.

It was a smile as spontaneous and genuine as the pile of shit I’d stepped in was deep.

The conclusion was as clear as the whipped nougat was delicious:

I felt as though I were following the headsman to the town square to receive my just punishment.

Because the greatest opportunities present themselves when all hope is lost.

Beads of sweat covered her arms as though her skin was a pancake in the making.

looked Brazilian, with bronzed bubble butts so big you could have gotten loans to build condos on them in the days of zero percent financing.

Stalin’s ghost appears in a dream to Putin. He asks advice on how to lead the country.

Ziker’s Peoples of the Tundra, Ian Halliday’s Native Peoples

Love had been conditional in our house.

In the absence of familial bliss, we always have chocolate.

that as she aged, a woman had to decide whether to preserve her ass or her face. She couldn’t keep both.

It’s easy to forgive other people because you have no control over their actions. The hardest thing is to forgive yourself because you have control over your actions.

The Pirates lost their game, 8–2. Ryan Graves looked like any other pitcher, intense, a small player in a big world, Orestes, all of them. Now,

Once she turned fifty, her metabolism slowed and she shed all inhibitions about portion control.

To know God without being God-like is like trying to swim without entering water. —OREST BEDRIJ

Don’t be scared of getting scared, he said. It’s normal to be frightened in unusual circumstances. Make fear your friend. Let the fluttering in the belly and the pounding of the heart remind you to be alert and not do anything stupid. Then focus your mind on something else, Marko said. Picture yourself doing something you enjoy, and imagine you’re really doing it.

garrote out of his pocket. The three of them

You can’t trust anyone that drives a Maserati. It pretends to be a Ferrari but it’s not.

Love had been conditional in our house. Growing up it was based on scholastic achievement. Ever since I got a job, it was based on money.

In her world, guilt inspired remorse. Contrition was measured in dollars.

A waitress whose figure could have turned ketchup into Tabasco told me Marko was in the back.

A fractured family is the hardest break to mend. Sometimes . . . sometimes we need a little help from a stranger.

And I had other problems with Orestes, because he bought a dog.

ensued. It happened right in front of me. Then I felt my head falling