Home > Work > A Thousand Ships

A Thousand Ships QUOTES

A Thousand Ships QUOTES

1 " 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 "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

2 " Aphrodite, on the other hand, saw every wedding as a
small defeat. She prized love, but not the marital kind. Never the marital kind. What kind of love was that: companionship? The precursor to children? "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

3 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

5 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

6 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

8 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

10 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

11 " 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? "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

12 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

13 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

15 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

16 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

18 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

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

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships

20 " Why should the past be any guarantee of the future? "

― Natalie Haynes , A Thousand Ships