The Children of Jocasta Quotes

“Our gods are conveniently like us, he would say, and why should they be? No answer I offered to this question ever satisfied him, until I gave in and said it must be because we invented them.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can’t be faced. There is only an oppressive, creeping dread that the thing no one has told you is too terrible to imagine, and that it will haunt the rest of your life when you find out.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“Can you even begin to count the myriad ways in which your life might be affected by the choices of other people - people you have never met, whose existence is utterly hidden from you - are making every day?”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“Jocasta had never enjoyed being married to her husband more than at his funeral.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“Crowds are curious things: made up of individuals, but with a character entirely their own.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“Oedipus is famously clever; that’s how he solves the Sphinx’s virtually-impossible riddle, and earns his right to become King of Thebes. But his cleverness is also his tragic flaw: his quick-wittedness shades into quick-temperedness. This is a man who can solve a puzzle that has baffled all who came before him. But that same quickness explains how a man (who had been warned by an oracle that he would kill his father and was trying desperately to avoid his fate) could be reduced to a murderous frenzy at a crossroads by what amounts to a minor road-rage incident.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“there turned out to be a difference between knowing something terrible might be true, and discovering it was definitely true.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta

“So I should compose my own history, shouldn’t I? Or it will be lost forever.”
― Natalie Haynes, The Children of Jocasta