Medea Quotes

“But perhaps that was all love was in the end, a mutual haunting.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“If he wanted to call me his wife, he could, so long as he knew that I was no more his than the sea owns the sky.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Grace,” he said at last, as though the single word was clarification enough. “I don’t understand,” I moaned, wiping the rogue tears from my eyes. “I forgive you as an act of grace, against my own will. There is no alternative, because we only have each other. Forgiveness is like love—it is not something that can be controlled or rationed out. It exists or it does not.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“So this is romantic love. I could not decide if I wanted to laugh or be violently sick, but I did know I was utterly powerless to the feeling.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“We lived, I knew, in an age of monsters. Not all of them were beasts as obvious as dragons. Some walked among us as men.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“She says she doesn’t mind the dying,” he whispered after a while. “That she’s going back to be with her father.” I raised my eyebrows. “Her father?” I questioned, attempting to picture what ethereal metallic creature might have fathered this one. “Poseidon, God of the Sea,” Phaethon pronounced carefully. “Her mother is the nymph Theophane. Poseidon turned them both into rams to be together. And Theophane’s grandfather,” he paused, scrunching up his face once more, “is called Helios.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“I forgive you as an act of grace, against my own will. There is no alternative, because we only have each other. Forgiveness is like love—it is not something that can be controlled or rationed out. It exists or it does not.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Perhaps, femininity, together with foreignness, functioned in Ancient Greece as they do in the contemporary period, under fairly consistent policing, encompassing a kind of embodied, unspoken relational threat to innumerable societal structures that any hierarchical society might depend on.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“The Medea who scandalized antiquity is indelibly intertwined with social constructions of gender and sexuality, perilously tangled with historical conceptualizations of psychology and the divine, and even caught up in the interface between the perceived barbarity of foreign cultures and the sophisticated, erudite, and decidedly patriarchal civilization that was Ancient Greece. She has emerged as a condensed symbol of nefarious womanhood and a perpetual outsider, mediating a strange dichotomy between her native wildness and the chaos of the natural world and the carefully constrained and familiar realm of the domestic.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Music is what comes after the worst is done. It is the thing that heals,”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“I imagine you will sing exactly like yourself. As you are meant to.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Perhaps,” Phaethon added, “existence itself is merely the recognition that being exists alongside nonbeing. Paradox is the mightiest and most impossible thing to hold, and yet we do it. You are not evil or unnatural for viewing something from all of its sides, in all of its complexity.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Witchcraft relies on the connection among all things, the intrinsic links that tie us all together. And as far as voids go, I would imagine that all of us are mostly made up of space—although whether or not that qualifies as emptiness is another matter.” I leaned in to him,”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Surely, I was doomed to repeat the behaviors of one or the other of my parents, damaging my children, just as I had been damaged. The prospect was a potent kind of torture.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Trust, I knew, was an easy thing to feel when you yourself were trustworthy. Those who were the first to suspect were often the first to betray.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“There is no such thing as too much softness, not in a man with your power,” I whispered. “It is becoming for a man to be merciful just as it is necessary for a woman to be strong. Never forget that. You are exactly what you are meant to be.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“As he finished speaking, Phaethon glanced at me from under his long lashes. He seemed to be struggling with his next words. “What are you thinking?” I urged. “Just that I crushed a spider underfoot, the day before. And how she might have concealed a human soul, like yours or mine. Sometimes I am baffled by the cruelty of mortals and Gods alike. This world of ours is uncommonly brutal, and I worry occasionally that I may be too soft for it.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Chalciope, what is it?” I asked, aghast, reaching out to touch her shoulder, although the feel of her skin felt strange and unnatural under my fingers. We were no longer the loose-limbed children we had once been. Now there were secrets between us, so loathsome and dark that every gentleness I showed her felt disingenuous.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“Love magic is dangerous because to our Near Eastern friends, of all the things in this world, love is the most powerful and compelling. To make someone fall in love against their will is tantamount to taking over their body, mind, and spirit.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“I realized, haltingly, that chains of relationship extended from the stars to the earth and back again. It naturally followed that the spiritual might make itself known to the observer by way of physical manifestation, if one was only brave enough to look for it.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“It was miraculous what time alone in the quiet with even the most unassuming weed could do for the mind.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“How impossible it seemed that a berry might exist external to my own body, distinct and unfathomable, yet also inevitably nurtured in the heat of the same sun that rose on me each morning—sustained with the same water that I used to quench my thirst.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“My crew tells me I can be narrow-minded in the pursuit of my goals.” He appraised me before continuing. “When I want something, everything else disappears. I can be terribly stubborn, but then again so can you, by the looks of it. I currently have no country to call my own, and little to my name besides what Pelias has promised me upon my return. I am slow to trust, and slower still to love. I have little interest in scholarly pursuits. As a boy, Chiron found me easily distracted from my studies. When I become angry, I go silent, sometimes for days at a time. It makes me feel superior. Is that sufficient to satisfy your curiosity?”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“From her father, Oceanus, she knew intimately of her own naturalness. He informed her in the same way he informed all his daughters, somewhere between conception and the accumulating sentience of each successive rippling impulse. She was the thing that flowed, a current that ebbed and settled itself like a compulsion. The urge that heaved against riverbanks. A shored thing. An infinite thing. She could be cut, by ship or swimmer, but never wounded. This is water’s divinity.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“If she had been mortal, she might have felt her body shoring against itself, straining under the pressure of producing infant after infant. But she was a Titan, the wet nurse of the earth. And so, she gave birth to the rivers, which roared with vitality, and the streams, which moved more softly; the clouds that grew heavy with rainwater; and the springs that bubbled up from the center of the world. Such was the fertility of Tethys.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea

“It was dangerous to build a marriage on pragmatism, but perhaps an even more perilous pursuit to build it on love.”
― Eilish Quin, Medea