Meredith’s Reviews > Lavinia > Status Update

Lavinia: I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it.

Lavinia: Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed … [men] make a virtue of their rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

Lavinia: What is left after a death? Everything else.

Lavinia: Why must There be war?
Virgil: What a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.

Virgil: Not even need and love can defeat fate.

Virgil: Women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.

Lavinia: I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste.

Lavinia: Kings are quick to punish; it relieves their anxiety.