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Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths QUOTES

Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths QUOTES

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

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

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

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

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

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

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

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

5 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

6 " 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’. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

7 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

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

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

9 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

10 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

11 " The greatest virtue, in other words, that an Athenian woman could aspire to was not to be registered, almost not to exist. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

12 " It is the ultimate story about the power of music to change hearts and minds. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

13 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

14 " The fantasy comes to an end and she begs the gods to have mercy on her, and let her die. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

15 " Not for the first time, we see that an accurate translation has been sacrificed in the pursuit of making women less alarming (and less impressive) in English than they were in Greek. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

16 " Some versions of the Iliad which he had available to him apparently concluded, ‘And so they buried Hector. And then came an Amazon, the daughter of great-hearted Ares, killer of men.’24 Another variant identifies the Amazon by name, and mentions her mother too: ‘And then came an Amazon, the daughter of Otrera, graceful Penthesilea. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

17 " Whatever her reasons, she determines to try to use her death for someone else’s good – the defence of the Trojans. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, Priam, the king of Troy, offers her absolution for her crime.28 The word he uses is kathartheisa, ‘to cleanse’, from which we derive the word ‘catharsis’. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

18 " Anger at the loss of a fellow warrior – and revenge killing of the man responsible – motivates heroes throughout epic poetry. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

19 " 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. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths

20 " My own hands are twitching/ To squeeze the life out of that woman,/ To empty that innocent blood out of her carcase/ And smash her to nothing. "

― Natalie Haynes , Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths