An Oresteia Quotes

“I am a restrained person.
Otherwise my heart would race past my
tongue to pour out everything.
Instead I mumble,
I gnaw myself.
I lose hope.
And my mind is burning.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“PYLADES: I'll take care of you.
ORESTES: It's rotten work.
PYLADES: Not to me. Not if it's you.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“We are slaves to the gods. Whatever gods are.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“Yet again, isn’t there something terrible in randomness—the idea that at the very bottom of its calculations, real depravity has no master plan of any kind, it’s just a dreamy whim that slides out of people when they are trapped or bored or too lazy to analyze their own mania.”
― Aeschylus, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

“You have used me strangely.”
― Aeschylus, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

“Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax.”
― Aeschylus, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

“I am the shape you made me.
Filth teaches filth.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“Here he lies like something melting away. His mother’s blood comes quaking howling brassing bawling blacking down his mad little veins.”
― Aeschylus, An Oresteia: Agamemnon by Aiskhylos; Elektra by Sophokles; Orestes by Euripides

“But whenever I take to my restless dreamless dewdrenched bed
I cannot close my eyes – fear stands over me instead of sleep.
And whenever I think to sing or hum a tune to stay awake
then my tears fall.
This house is in trouble.
The good days are gone.
How I pray for a change! A happy change! A light in darkness.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“ELEKTRA: Whatever dooms there are men die,
whatever harms there are men have--
Godsent: they blast, we bend.

(Orestes)”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“ELEKTRA: If this is all you were, Orestes,
how could your memory
fill my memory,
how is it your soul fills my soul?....
Look!
You are nothing at all.
Just a crack where the light slipped through.
Oh, my child,
I thought I could save you.
I thought I could send you beyond.
But there is not beyond.
.....somewhere, I don't know where -
suddenly alone you stopped -
where death was.
You stopped.
And I would have waited
and washed you
and lifted you
up from the fire
like a whitened coal.
....Into your child's fingers I put the earth and the sky.
No mother did that for you.
No nurse.
No slave.
I. Your sister,
without letting go,
day after day, year after year,
and you my own sweet child.
But death was a wind too strong for that.
One day three people vanished.
Father. You. Me. Gone.
Now our enemies rock with laughter.
And she runs mad for joy -
that creature
in the shape of your mother -
how often you said you would come
one secret evening and cut her throat!
But our luck canceled that,
whatever luck is.
And instead my beloved,
luck sent you back to me
colder than ashes,
later than shadows.
....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!
Only void is between us.
And I see that the dead feel no pain.

(Elektra, by Sophocles)”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“Oh stop whining .
And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those
multitudes of men
As if she all alone
made this wound in us.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“ELEKTRA: Apollo made us sacrificial victims
in his murder exchange of father for mother.

CHORUS: Justice, on the one hand.

ELEKTRA: Evil, on the other.
Mother, as you killed so you die.
But you've ruined us all.
You at least went off to be among the dead.
I live on here as corpse beside Orestes' bed.
Nights and tears and groaning, nothing else
is mine.
No marriage, no house, no children, just
time.

(Orestes)”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“I am the shape you made me. Filth teaches Filth.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia

“I cannot not grieve.”
― Anne Carson, An Oresteia