Illiad Quotes

“The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.”
― Thomas C. Foster, How to Read Literature Like a Professor

“Always, in these times, I am wretched save when sleep comes to me. Therefore, I have come to look upon sleep as the best of all gifts.” - Helen, about the war”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of The Iliad

“Achilles shook him. "Just come back.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“And then I remembered: he will never be old.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Almost nothing is known about Homer, which explains why so much has been written about him.”
― Richard Armour, The Classics Reclassified

“Helen

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.”
― H.D., Collected Poems, 1912-1944

“Ἀμαζόνες ἀντιάνειραι”
― Homer

“Never lose sight of the fact that writing is a strange, inhuman function, a reflection of the inhumanity of language itself. Through writing, language, which is a domestic species, becomes a wild one again.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004