Top 80 Natalie Haynes Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “When women take up space, there is less available for men. But it means we get a whole story instead of half of one.”

— Natalie Haynes

2. “There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet that is determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea hypothesis.”

— Natalie Haynes

3. “Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death. And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold.”

— Natalie Haynes

4. “Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.”

— Natalie Haynes

5. “It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialised as much as any other person.”

— Natalie Haynes

6. “But this is a women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.”

— Natalie Haynes

7. “If you hurt her, she will make you regret it. Her revenge will exceed your original wrong and no one will ever be able to say of her that she let her enemies get away with something.”

— Natalie Haynes

8. “How much epic poetry does the world really need? Every conflict joined, every war fought, every city besieged, every town sacked, every village destroyed. Every impossible journey, every shipwreck, every homecoming: these stories have all been told, and countless times. Can he really believe he has something new to say? And does he think he might need me to help him keep track of all his characters, or to fill those empty moments where the metre doesn’t fit the tale?”

— Natalie Haynes

9. “I’m wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Gorgons are both these things, certainly, although Medusa wasn’t always. Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty.”

— Natalie Haynes

10. “And the monster? Who is she? She is what happens when someone cannot be saved.”

— Natalie Haynes

11. “A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?”

— Natalie Haynes

12. “Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings.”

— Natalie Haynes

13. “I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight.”

— Natalie Haynes

14. “The sea gods keep their secrets deep; they always have.”

— Natalie Haynes

15. “For my mum, who has always thought that a woman with an axe was more interesting than a princess.”

— Natalie Haynes

16. “Kings are often arrogant men.′ Clytemnestra said. ‘It is what reminds the rest of us that they are kings.”

— Natalie Haynes

17. “But when a city was sacked, everything within it was destroyed, right down to its words.”

— Natalie Haynes

18. “Ten years, now, and still Menelaus can neither persuade his wife to come back home, nor accept that he is a red-faced bore and find himself a new wife, one less exacting than Helen.”

— Natalie Haynes

19. “Not every story leaves the teller unharmed.”

— Natalie Haynes

20. “A beautiful woman whom men find all the more alluring because she is essentially mute? I know, I always think the shock will kill me too.”

— Natalie Haynes

21. “They will fear you and flee you and call you a monster, just like they do your sisters.′ ‘It doesn’t matter what they think of me.’ ‘Then why do you want to protect them?’ ‘Because I can,’ she said.”

— Natalie Haynes

22. “Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were.”

— Natalie Haynes

23. “She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.”

— Natalie Haynes

24. “Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.”

— Natalie Haynes

25. “He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.”

— Natalie Haynes

26. “Medusa wasn’t always a monster, Helen of Troy wasn’t always an adulterer, Pandora wasn’t ever a villain.”

— Natalie Haynes

27. “If you’re not lonely, then what are you?′ The goddess blinked once or twice as she tried to find her answer. ‘I helped so many men find their way home,’ she said. ‘Because they had lost themselves on a quest or in a war and all they wanted was to return home. No matter what adventures they had, what riches they held, what wonders they saw, what they really wanted was to remember those things from the safety of their homes.”

— Natalie Haynes

28. “If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.”

— Natalie Haynes

29. “When women take up space, there is less available for men. But it means we get a whole story instead of half of one. It scarcely needs saying that our understanding of the story of Oedipus is enriched when we know the story of Jocasta, and vice versa.”

— Natalie Haynes

30. “He had the feeling he was irritating his divine companions, but he didn’t really know why, so he didn’t know how to stop.”

— Natalie Haynes

31. “There’s comfort in stories which don’t change, even the sad ones.”

— Natalie Haynes

32. “But these myths are full of violence and we should at least ask why it is the violence against women that is removed in order to make our heroes uncomplicated adventurers.”

— Natalie Haynes

33. “A name can be in lots of places at once, she replies. A person can’t.”

— Natalie Haynes

34. “He saw Medusa as a monster and he sees Stenno and Euryale as the same. All he hears is danger from this creature that wishes him harm. He doesn’t hear sorrow or loss.”

— Natalie Haynes

35. “Men will tell you that Gorgons are monsters, but men are fools. They cannot comprehend any beauty beyond what they can see. And what they see is a tiny part of what there is.”

— Natalie Haynes

36. “The message is simple: women are stronger together than apart, even ones with superpowers.”

— Natalie Haynes

37. “Gorgons aren’t supposed to be like gods. We belong here, in the place between the land and the sea, not on a lofty mountain. They put our image on the outside of temples, not within. We look out on mortals, not down on them.”

— Natalie Haynes

38. “I feel like becoming the monster he made.”

— Natalie Haynes

39. “What happened to her?’ ‘You got her pregnant.’ ‘Marvellous. Will I have a new demi-god roaming the earth?’ ‘You already do.’ ‘That’s wonderful.’ ‘He’s about to drown.’ ‘Oh. Let me –.”

— Natalie Haynes

40. “Who could love a coward?′ She had once heard a woman say. Laodamia knew the answer. Someone for whom the alternative is loving a corpse.”

— Natalie Haynes

41. “Can you even begin to count the myriad ways in which your life might be affected by the choices of other people – people you have never met, whose existence is utterly hidden from you – are making every day?”

— Natalie Haynes

42. “Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.”

— Natalie Haynes

43. “She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.”

— Natalie Haynes

44. “Our gods are conveniently like us, he would say, and why should they be? No answer I offered to this question ever satisfied him, until I gave in and said it must be because we invented them.”

— Natalie Haynes

45. “You can’t prove what you believe,′ she said. ‘You can only believe it.”

— Natalie Haynes

46. “I’m wondering if you still think of her as a monster. I suppose it depends on what you think that word means. Monsters are, what? Ugly? Terrifying? Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty. And is a monster always evil? Is there ever such a thing as a good monster? Because what happens when a good person becomes a monster?”

— Natalie Haynes

47. “She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.”

— Natalie Haynes

48. “When people ask why tell the stories that we know best from the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, or Circe’s perspective, they presuppose that the story ‘should’ be told from Odysseus’ point of view. Which means the answer to this question should always be: because she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from her?”

— Natalie Haynes

49. “Certainly not Perseus who – you’ll soon see – has no interest in the wellbeing of any creature if it impedes his desire to do whatever he wants. He is a vicious little thug and the sooner you grasp that, and stop thinking of him as a brave boy hero, the closer you’ll be to understanding what actually happened.”

— Natalie Haynes

50. “When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else.”

— Natalie Haynes