Electra Quotes

“I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Yes it will be a grace if I die. To exist is pain. Life is no desire of mine anymore.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“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.”
― Euripides, Electra

“Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him. Not by groaning, not by prayers. Yet you run yourself out in a grief with no cure, no time-limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable?”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You're dreaming, girl, lost in a moving dream.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“There is a kind of excellence in me and you—born in us—and it cannot live in shame.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“ORESTES: Just to see the outline of your suffering

ELECTRA: Yet this is only a fraction of it you see.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I am at the end. I exist no more.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Shame I do feel. And I know there is something all wrong about me—believe me. Sometimes I shock myself.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I will not live by rules like those.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“What an ugly, loveless life for a girl.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“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.”
― Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral

“This is Electra. Brilliant no more.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“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.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Yes I know sorrow. Know it far too well. My life is a tunnel choked by the sweepings of dread.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“All my love gone for nothing. Days of my love, years of my love.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Orestes beloved. as you die you destroy me. You have torn away the part of my mind where hope was .”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Electra, grieving for death, for her father, as a nightingale grieving always.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Oh my love take me there. Let me dwell where you are. I am already nothing, I am already burning. Oh my love, I was once part of you—take me too!”
― Sophocles, Electra

“And instead my beloved, luck sent you back to me colder than ashes, later than shadow.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Not long now: the blazing dream of my head is crawling out.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Here he comes like a stealing shadow, like a footprint of death into the rooms, stalking the past with freshcut blood in his hands.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Long have we lived in shadows and shuddering: today I think our future is opening out.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“But death was a wind too strong for that.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Careful! There is war in women too, as you know by experience, I think.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You drive me back down my desperation—that unclouded incurable never forgotten evil growing inside my life.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I, Electra, fingering my garments
and my face, for in hours I was changed.
Now I am merely one who has killed.”
― Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral

“Que antes ti haya una mesa colmada y te sea la vida fácil. ¡Que tenga yo por único alimento el no contradecirme a mí misma!”
― Sófocles, Electra