Ransom Quotes

“Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“We are mortals, not gods. We die. Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us. That is the hard bargain life makes with us — with all of us, every one — and the condition we share. And for that reason, if no other, we should have pity for one another's losses. For the sorrows that must come sooner or later to each one of us, in a world we enter only on mortal terms.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your favour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told. He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it. Not as he filled his old role as king, since all he had to do in that case was follow convention, slip his arms into the sleeves of an empty garment and stand still, but as one for whom every gesture had still to be hit upon, every word discovered anew, to say nothing of the conviction needed to carry all to its conclusion. He has done that and is coming home, even in these last days of his life, as a man remade.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“He had entered the rough world of men, where a man's acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of story.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“The world, for Achilles, reassembled itself around a new centre.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“It re-enters the world of the Iliad to recount the story of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector, and, in a very different version from the original, Priam’s journey to the Greek camp. But its primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Patroclus was to be his adoptive brother, and the world, for Achilles, reassembled itself around the new centre. His true spirit leapt forth and declared itself. It was as if he had all along needed this other before he could become fully himself. From this moment on he could conceive of nothing in the life he must live that Patroclus would not share in and approve.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Call on me, Priam,’ he says lightly, ‘when the walls of Troy are falling around you, and I will come to your aid.’ It is their moment of parting. Priam pauses, and the cruelty of the answer that comes to his lips surprises him. ‘And if, when I call, you are already among the shades?’ Achilles feels a chill pass through him. It is cold out here. ‘Then alas for you, Priam, I will not come.’ It is, Achilles knows, a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly. Smiling in the foreknowledge of what they have already seen, both of them, he lifts his hand, and on a word from the driver the cart jolts on out of the camp.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Beauty the one is called, and the other Shock, though there is no reason why anyone here should know this, and he decides, in a spirit of quiet resistance, to keep these names to himself.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Perhaps he is wrong and no offence is intended; they are simply acting in accordance with their father’s odd wishes, and however foolish and effeminate they may appear, this is the way they always speak.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“For the whole half-century of his kingship, the herald who has attended Priam on all ceremonial occasions, to carry the royal staff, and raise his voice and speak for him when speech is required, has borne the old Dardanian name of Idaeus, though whether the man who appeared at his side was at every point the same Idaeus he has never found the need to ask. It is the office and the name that matters, not the person, and it is in the light of this identification of name with office, and the continuity of the office in the name, that Priam, who has already made one bold decision, is led now to another.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“But since he is to be my fine gift to you, and to show that I am a man of my word, let his name, from now on, be Priam, the price paid, the gift given to buy your brother back from the dead. So that each time he hears himself named, this is what he will recall.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Priam shakes his head. This kind of women’s talk unnerves him. It is not in his sphere. He remembers nothing of a dagger carved like a dog, or that his son Troilus had been slow to walk.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“He finds her already risen and sitting, very erect, on the day bed in her sitting room. A cruse lamp is burning at the top of a tall copper stand.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Helenus, by contrast, is Apollo’s consecrated priest. What exists quite naturally in Priam as an aspect of daily being, and in Cassandra as self-induced hysteria, has in Helenus taken a sleek professional form. Austere and commanding but entirely conventional, he is a man, Priam feels, who is too comfortable in the flesh.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Her brothers taunt her without mercy, seeing in this half-crazed mystic and self-proclaimed bride of Apollo a girl who has always claimed too much for herself, a practised attention-seeker”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“He had cut the throats as well of two of the nine dogs Patroclus kept, and dragged a dozen highborn Trojan prisoners to the place, all the time raging and weeping. And still it was not enough. Still his grief was not consumed.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Xanthus, the more nervous, the more impulsive of the two, is Achilles’ favourite.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“These horses were a gift from the gods at his parents’ wedding. Balius and Xanthus, they are called.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“You will not long outlive me, Achilles,’ the voice whispered. Then, ‘The days are few now that you have to walk on the earth. To eat and exchange talk with your companions and enjoy the pleasures of women. Already, away there in your father’s house in Phthia, they are preparing to mourn.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“the helmet with the horsehair crest and nodding plume – his helmet, which every man at Troy, Greek and Trojan, recognised as his and knew him by”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“The generals had awarded him as a prize of war a captured slave-girl, Briseis, and in the time she had been with him he had grown fond of her. Then Agamemnon’s own prize, Chryseis, was ransomed and sent back to Troy, and the great commander, in his lordly way, had claimed his prize, Briseis, in her place. He had refused of course and not politely. And when Agamemnon, incensed at the rebuff, had roared and raged and crudely berated him, he too lost his temper and, barely able to restrain himself from striking the man, had stormed out of the assembly, retired to his hut, refused all further contact and withdrawn his troops from the battle-lines.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“The story Menoetius had to tell was a shocking one. The boy with the big hands and feet was his son, Patroclus. Ten days ago, in a quarrel over a game of knucklebones, he had struck and killed one of his companions, the ten-year-old son of Amphidamas, a high official of the royal court. Menoetius was bringing the boy to Phthia as an outcast seeking asylum.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“The story Menoetius had to tell was a shocking one. The boy with the big hands and feet was his son, Patroclus.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Far out where the gulf deepens, small waves kick up, gather, then collapse, and new ones replace them; and this, even as he watches, repeats itself, and will do endlessly whether he is here or not to observe it.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“Even the memory then, of what once was, will have grown dim in the minds of a generation who, for the whole of their lives, have known nothing but chaos and lawlessness.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“However the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now til his last breath.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“The bronze-haired avenger of his father's death, already filled with the fierce light of the future, is at sea and sailing fast for Troy.”
― David Malouf, Ransom

“She had given him up. That was the hard condition of his being and of all commerce between them.”
― David Malouf, Ransom