33 Quotes About Odyssey

The madness of our endless minds bewitched in magic...(fragment from Our last tango, chapter Passion)

But they could neither of them persuade me, for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.

They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus

The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?

In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth)

What we give to the poor, we lend to God.

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.

Now they made all secure in the fast black ship,and, setting out the wine bowls all a-brim,they made libation to the gods, the undying, the ever-new,most of all to the grey-eyed daughter of Zeus.And the prow sheared through the night into the dawn.(Translation by Robert Fitzgerald 1961)

Is he the kind to talk in riddles, or love someone who would?