Atalanta Quotes

“The oracle warned that I would lose myself, but the opposite is true. I am more myself than I have ever been. I am wild, I am free. I am Atalanta.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“Jason thought the world was built for heroes. I knew we had to build it ourselves.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I remembered how much I had admired Hypsipyle’s strength and courage in fighting to claim the city as her own, but then she had offered it up to Jason. Medea had the power to charm monsters and heal mortal injuries, magic that lay the world at her feet, and yet she tried to shrink herself down to a life at his side. I wasn’t going to do that.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“needed to remember who I was, who I had always been. A woman who was unafraid.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“Men who thought the world belonged to them, who imagined I was just another trophy that they could win.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“The world beyond was such an alien place; I was learning every day how different it was. And maybe I was different, too.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“You have power and courage, speed and skill far beyond what's needed in this forest... And you're better already than any warrior out there. You're greater than any man laying claim to the name of a hero. The world should know the name Atalanta. They should see what you can do.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“Standing in the shadows, gathering my resolve. I'd been among too many people, living according to their rules for too long. It was clouding my vision, gnawing away at my confidence and certainty, making me doubt the instincts that kept me alive all these years. I needed to remember who I was, who I had always been: A woman who was unafraid.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“We aren't the only girls with fathers like these. They're more common than you might think. He told me the stories like different fathers might spin tales of love and happiness. Nycteus, who threatened his lovely daughter with fearful punishments when she was raped by Zeus. Danaë, another of Zeus's victims, another whose father blamed her and cast her and her baby off to sea inside a sealed chest, hoping it would be her tomb. Echetus, who blinded his daughter for the crime of looking at a man. That was the kind of husband my father would have chosen for me, if he had the chance.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“People remember what they want. They'll lap up the tales of the Argo and be all too happy to forget you were ever there. If you're living in obscurity, hunting in this forest, all that will be left will be rumors. No one will know who you were or what you did.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“It was me who suggested it. Her voice was low. Me who asked the women how we could ever go back to our lives, shoulder to shoulder with those men, knowing what they were capable of doing. We couldn’t break bread with them, let them into our beds, bear their children, not now that we knew the monsters that dwelled behind their human faces.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I missed the spread of the sky above me. Sometimes as I lay awake, I yearned so powerfully for freedom; for the dark silhouette of the Argo, blotting out the stars behind it; the promise of another journey and another land with every sunrise; thate resentment churned stomach, it's bile scolding my throat.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I despised my father, of course I did. The thought of presenting myself to him, of him thinking that my deeds could reflect on him was repulsive, that he thought what I would do would be a substitute for the son he'd never had, that he imagined that I would go back and take that place. I flung the thin woolen blankets aside, thinking I would set out into the darkness, out run my anger until I was gasping and breathless. But somehow, my feet took me to Parthenopaeus..”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I've been fighting every day of my life. I don't want to tussle with enemies anymore; I don't want to face pain and suffering and death. I am tired of battles. When your ship came to Colchis, I saw another life. A man not like my father, not a cruel tyrant, not a sadistic torturer. A man who can give me a home and children, a life without fear.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“And every man will want to beat me, I thought. It was an opportunity they’d relish. A chance to put me in my place, to show the woman who thought she was as good as the heroes that she couldn’t keep up. “I’ll race.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“But the main thing I wanted was to live untouched by men. I wasn’t going to find myself in my mother’s position if I could help it.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“She had chosen him, that was certain. But he let himself be carried along with the tides, allowed them to sway him this way and then another. And one day he might look around and ask how he ended up where he did, as though he’d had no way to prevent it.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I made a bargain with him: if he let me have the mountains and my girls, then I'd keep out of Hera's way. But the main thing I wanted was to live untouched by men. I wasn't going to find myself in my mother's position if I could help it.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“While I was thankful to Orpheus for protecting us from the lure of their song, I wished there was a way I could have seen them more closely. I felt drawn toward them by something other than their magic. It was their rage, I thought, the anger for their stolen girl that made them punish every man they saw.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“The warmth in his voice was like honey in sunlight, his fingers brushing the nape of my neck. I felt a momentary burst of anger at him, that even with a wife waiting for him back home he never felt himself bound by rules or hampered by the promises he’d made.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“Artemis sighed. “She’s free of men forever. So, better off than most.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“There were a thousand interconnected threads crisscrossing through it: from the ancient roots soaking up water deep beneath the earth so that the trees could lift their mighty crowns toward the sun, to the insects that burrowed into the deep crevices of the bark, to the birds that nested in the boughs, to the deer that trotted lightly and the stalking predators ready to pounce. And in the heart of it all, there was me.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“across”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“Necesitaba recordar quién era, quién había sido siempre. Una mujer que no tenía miedo.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I didn’t have to be an obedient follower of Artemis, jumping to serve her every command; I didn’t have to be a hero in the mold of Jason or Heracles or the angry boar hunters at Calydon. I wasn’t going to try to shape myself to be like one of them, a ruthless, self-serving, glory-seeking man. I was something different from them all.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“That’s what heroes won: shining trophies they could hold before the world to prove their courage and endurance. I had fought at their sides; I was better than them. I’d conquered every doubt and misgiving that anyone could have held about me, but this is what I’d brought back—no golden fruits tended by immortals, no glorious prize, but an encumbrance nurtured by my own body, the body that had never let me down before. It made me seethe, and I vowed that I would not be ruined by this.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“started to wonder if he’d come to the same conclusion as me; that what we had shared had been left behind across the waves, something that already felt as though it had been a dream. Then I’d catch his eye across the circle and a flash of memory would unsettle me, like a stone dropped into a still pond.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I wondered how Persephone felt when she stepped between her two worlds. If, when she came back home, she ever missed what she had left behind.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“The voyage of the Argonauts was over, we had won, and despite my joy, I felt more unsure than I had done when we embarked from that harbor into the unknown; more rootless and unmoored than when we had sailed for the edge of the world. We were home, but I wasn’t the same woman who had left, and in my heart I wondered if I could step back into the life I had always led, if it waited there for me, or if the forest had grown over my absence as if I had never been there at all.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta

“I wondered what that must feel like. To have their respect unmixed with resentment or suspicion.”
― Jennifer Saint, Atalanta