House of Odysseus Quotes

“Either live with that fire in your heart, or die in shrivelled, blackened grief. No one will forgive you. No forgiveness will ever be enough. And no one but you can make your actions the apology that the dead are owed. Repent and live – and stop asking the dead to take the pain away. They cannot. You will live with it, and that is all.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“This is the way with grief. With guilt. With regret. All we can do is honour the lessons this brings, look honestly upon who we were and what we have done, and try to do better when the next sun rises.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“We women of sky and fire, we goddesses, we are so mighty, and yet if we learn anything from old mother Hera, it is that the brighter we blaze, the more the men line up to make us fall.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“I look back at my life and tell myself that the choices I made were the only ones that could be made, the only thing to be done. This is true, of course. It is also a lie. There were words spoken that could have been expressed some other way. There were secrets held. Judgements made. I cannot change them now. I run through my memories again and again, and every time they grow more distorted, the truth vanishing into fantasy.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“They will think, perhaps, that the torment of another may in some way alleviate the pain of their hearts, and they will be wrong.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“I begin to see that perhaps there is some small protection in being the fool. The giggling girl who understands nothing and thinks only of carnal pleasure or temporary satisfaction. That being the fool is in fact… wise. Safe. An intelligent, capable, living human – such we may hold accountable for their actions. But a simpering girl?”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“When only one man can win, it is remarkable how many men will consider themselves the guaranteed winner, whispered Odysseus.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Penelope looks Menelaus in the eye, looks him up and down, and is for a moment the most beautiful mortal thing upon this land, even though Helen herself is not a minute’s scamper away. There is a word here for her beauty – a word like power, or victory; or perhaps even more arousing still, there is that in Penelope that is untamed.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Did you like Zosime?” The question stuns Tryphosa. It astonishes her. It appals her. It is faintly disgusting, uncouth. A queen asking not merely about a maid, but the sentiment of a maid? The affection one maid may have for another, the relationship between two women who are no better than slaves? Queens do not care for such things. It would be undignified, inconvenient for them to do so. It implies that the woman Penelope addresses has feelings. Feels hurt. Knows pain. Is indeed human. And Tryphosa has worked so hard, for so long, to be anything but human.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“There is something really rather magnificent about a woman who knows what she is doing, Laertes decides, but damned if he will ever say as much.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“For a woman to contemplate her own beauty is vanity, superficial pride, shallow beyond contempt, the sign of a mindless slut. Of course for a woman to be anything less than beautiful is for her to be ugly, or in the best case invisible and without merit, and that is also unacceptable, but still, but still. The most a woman born without socially acceptable perfection can do is worry about these things in secret, rather than be caught trying.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Even as a child, Helen was told by all who saw her what a pretty thing she was, what a beautiful woman she would grow up to be. A prophecy uttered so many times must be fulfilled. No one told Helen that she would grow up to be royal, regal, wise, learned or revered, so it didn’t really occur to her childlike mind that these might be aspirations to seek.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“I may not have gone to Troy, boy, but I was getting pissed with Nestor while you were just a fantasy in your mother’s eye. I was shitting round the back of Theseus’s palace and getting hammered with fucking centaurs while you were still a toothless little shit sucking on your mother’s titty. You can guard a queen all day long – queens need some guarding. But don’t think for an instant you can get away with guarding a king.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Love – the love of a soul that learns to fly, to delight in the flight of another – was never on their minds. And so they were never much on mine.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“The trick, I find," muses Penelope, "to living with a pain that cannot be reconciled, a grief, or a fury, a rage that you think will burn you from the inside out, is not to dwell on all the reasons why your life has ended, but to wonder what it might become now. I am a widow queen. This is my trap, my curse. My power. My grief is a knife. My anger is cunning. Having been denied the purpose intended for me--to be a wife, a loving mother--my purpose is to be a queen, to serve not myself, but my kingdom. *Mine.* The land that is entrusted to *me.* Not to my husband's ghost. Not some... poet's picture of Odysseus. But to me. I will live and I will take all that has been put upon me and I will make of it something new. Something better.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“How strange the ocean looks, she thinks, when one is not waiting for someone to sail upon it.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“At this, Helen gives a little cry. It is a tiny “ah!”, as if she had trodden on a jagged stone with bare feet, a thing that comes, goes, happened and has passed but still, it hurt – goodness, it stung. Before anyone can ask after her well-being, however, she closes her eyes and turns her face away, a dismissal given by one who does not wish to speak of her distress, lest more distress be given.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Antinous learned how to be a blusterer from his father, but consequently the only man he cannot out-bluster, cannot out-harangue is the very man who taught him, and who does not understand that the qualities he dislikes in his son are the self-same qualities he cannot perceive in himself.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Funny how often divinities are found to agree with the actions mortals most desire. It is a trait I have often noted, and would find annoying if it wasn’t so often quaintly delightful in its unexpected consequences.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“while the drummer, clad only in a really rather charming loincloth that leaves little to the imagination, maintains his rhythm. Not many men can get away with displaying so much buttock while on the job, but Spartans have always had very strong opinions about male beauty, and though it can lead to some socially toxic long-term consequences, right now I am here for it.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“The priestess of the temple is called Anaitis, and she has just the most fabulous line in earthy, hunky sexiness that you will ever see. My goodness, if ever there was a woman for caressing in a field of barley it is her – but alas, she does not see herself in that way, for as Autonoe approaches the lady with autumn hair who stands in the porch of the shrine, Anaitis folds her arms and tuts: “What’s happened now?”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“The soldier who led this group – a man of notched chin and significant thigh that under normal circumstances I’d find really quite enthralling – considered this a moment.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“I cursed the soldier who so dared touch my devoted one, barely noticing what I did: he would love and he would bind his heart to passion and when he had given his all, then he would be betrayed. And then genital disfigurement. One does not cross Aphrodite without some thoroughly explicit consequences.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“The soldier who led this group – a man of notched chin and significant thigh that under normal circumstances I’d find really quite enthralling – considered this a moment. Then he laid his hand upon my priestess’s shoulder and shoved her – he actually shoved my priestess, upon my sacred hearth! – so hard she lost her footing and half fell, caught by one of the waiting women before she could tumble entirely. Golden nectar splashed around the lip of the bath, spilling in shimmering pools about the white marble floor as I sat upright, the bones of my long, silken hand standing out white. I cursed the soldier who so dared touch my devoted one, barely noticing what I did: he would love and he would bind his heart to passion and when he had given his all, then he would be betrayed. And then genital disfigurement. One does not cross Aphrodite without some thoroughly explicit consequences.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“It is not acceptable to ask a lady her age, but she had grown well into her beauty, wearing the lines about her eyes with mirth, a twist about her smile and a flash of her fragrant wrist as though to say “I may not be young, but what merry tricks have I learned!”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Yet I would far rather they suffer a quick rejection from false desire than the slow heartache of a life lived without truest, purest love.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“Penelope is at the turning age of life where a woman has either found that sense of herself that makes any creature radiant, beautiful, a splendour to the heart and the eye; or in her flailing and thrashing about for identity has reverted fitfully to some younger time, painting her face with wax and lead and rubbing henna into her hair in the hope perhaps of buying a little more time to learn to love the changing visage she sees in the reflecting pool.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus

“I have never feared the forgetful river of Hades,” Elektra replies, soft as a mountain stream, and Priene is familiar enough with killing to see the truth of it, and wise enough to wonder why.”
― Claire North, House of Odysseus