Top 150 Natalie Haynes Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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

52. “Every myth contains multiple timelines within itself: the time in which it is set, the time it is first told, and every retelling afterwards.”

— Natalie Haynes

53. “There’s never any real need to say something hurtful unless you can’t help it.”

— Natalie Haynes

54. “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

55. “In the small hours of the morning, when men and women whispered their secret prayers, they were to her. They begged not for health and long life, as they did during daylight hours. They begged for the blinding, deafening force of lust to be visited upon them, and they begged for reciprocation.”

— Natalie Haynes

56. “Because really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas?”

— Natalie Haynes

57. “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

58. “It takes a certain kind of cruelty, Odysseus, to look upon desperate men and see only swine.”

— Natalie Haynes

59. “But feeling fear was not the same as lacking courage. Anyone could be brave if he felt no fear. The Trojans murmured that this was true of Achilles, this was why he was so lethal. He rode into battle on his chariot, with no care whether he lived or died. None at all. He cared only for the safety of his friend, for Patroclus.”

— Natalie Haynes

60. “You’re the one who thinks anything that doesn’t look like you must be a monster.′ ‘They have snakes for hair!’ Perseus cried. ‘Snakes are’t monsters,’ said Hermes. ‘And tusks.’ ‘Wild boar aren’t monsters either.’ ‘And wings.’ ‘I’m sure even you don’t think birds are monsters.”

— Natalie Haynes

61. “Euripides was an astonishing writer of women. He wrote more and better female roles than almost any other male playwright who has ever lived.”

— Natalie Haynes

62. “She saw all his vanity and pettiness and wondered why mortals worshipped any god like this.”

— Natalie Haynes

63. “Some versions of the Iliad which he had available to him apparently concluded, ‘And so they buried Hector. And then came an Amazon, the daughter of great-hearted Ares, killer of men.’24 Another variant identifies the Amazon by name, and mentions her mother too: ‘And then came an Amazon, the daughter of Otrera, graceful Penthesilea.”

— Natalie Haynes

64. “He thinks anyone who is not like him is a monster: have you noticed? And any monster needs killing.”

— Natalie Haynes

65. “Their stories should be read, seen, heard in all their difficult, messy, murderous detail. They aren’t simple, because nothing interesting is simple.”

— Natalie Haynes

66. “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

67. “No one could help being afraid of something. And being afraid of dying must be especially awful, because there was no hope of avoiding it.”

— Natalie Haynes

68. “He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?”

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

70. “But one thing is certain: those daughters of Leda are a plague on their menfolk. Did Odysseus worry that he would receive a similar welcome here on Ithaca? That I, the devout Penelope, would treat him as Clytemnestra had treated her husband? The idea is preposterous. My name is a byword for patience and loyalty, no matter which bard sings it. But that is my Odysseus. And your Odysseus. Always finding things out the hard way.”

— Natalie Haynes

71. “News always reached Miss Marple, one way or another.”

— Natalie Haynes

72. “Mortals are all the same,′ she said to her sisters. ‘They think their concerns are everyone’s concerns.”

— Natalie Haynes

73. “She could feel the seagrass fluttering and the soft curves the wind left on the sand beneath her feet. She still had so much, she reminded herself.”

— Natalie Haynes

74. “When we think of Pandora, we probably have a picture in our minds. She holds a box in her hands, or she’s sitting beside one. She is opening it either because she is curious to see what’s inside, or because she knows what it contains and wants to let it out. Its contents are abstract but terrible: all the evils in the world are now set loose upon us. And, gratifyingly, we know exactly who to blame: the beautiful woman who couldn’t leave well alone.”

— Natalie Haynes

75. “Men often kill for trophies.”

— Natalie Haynes

76. “The distinction that only sciences are useful and only arts are spirit-enhancing is a nonsensical one. I couldn’t write much without scientists designing my computer. And some of them must want to read about Greek myth after a long day at work. These Muses always remind me that scientists and artists should disregard the idiotic attempts to separate us. We are all nerds, in the end.”

— Natalie Haynes

77. “Why should the past be any guarantee of the future?”

— Natalie Haynes

78. “Euryale liked humans... She liked the way they were so prone to anxiety and haste.”

— Natalie Haynes

79. “We don’t think the sheep have stopped being sheep because we sheared them.”

— Natalie Haynes

80. “Pandora’s box’ is an idiom, a shorthand in a way that ‘Eve’s apple’ never has been.”

— Natalie Haynes

81. “And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.”

— Natalie Haynes

82. “He felt another rush of anger that he knew so little but was expected to achieve so much.”

— Natalie Haynes

83. “Euripides is one of the greatest writers of female voices in antiquity and, frankly, in the history of theatre.”

— Natalie Haynes

84. “Power is something you can control,’ Sthenno said. ‘Medusa can turn anything to stone, yes. But she can’t not do it, if she doesn’t want to.”

— Natalie Haynes

85. “To some people, a woman with power and a voice is always a monster. And for some of these people, death and disfigurement are an appropriate response to such women.”

— Natalie Haynes

86. “Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic.”

— Natalie Haynes

87. “But she missed the sight of fish darting around her feet as she stood in glittering water. She wanted to see the graceful birds in flight, not just hear them as they squabbled. She wanted to squint into the sun and witness the growing and changing of the seasons. She yearned for the bright pink cyclamen petals instead of the dark, twisting red that was all she could see behind the bindings.”

— Natalie Haynes

88. “We know Pandora is beautiful. But what is she actually like? We get only one phrase which might tell us, before Hesiod gets side-tracked explaining how women will only want you if you aren’t poor, and comparing them unfavourably to bees.”

— Natalie Haynes

89. “Men call you monsters because they don’t understand you.’ ‘I don’t mind being a monster,’ Euryale replied. ‘I would rather have power than not. I like being what scares them.”

— Natalie Haynes

90. “I know when you talk of beauty you mean something different from what I mean.’ ‘I see.’ He took a step towards her, and she forced herself not to take a step back. ‘So what do you mean by beauty, little Gorgon?’ ‘Euryale tends every one of her sheep like it is a child. Sthenno learned to cook so she could feed me when I was little. They care about me and protect me. That is beauty.”

— Natalie Haynes

91. “They care about me and protect me. That is beauty.”

— Natalie Haynes

92. “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

93. “Her name on this pot is given as Anesidora, meaning ‘she who sends up gifts’, much as the earth sends up the shoots of plants which will feed us and our livestock. So Pandora’s intrinsic generosity is erased if we think of her only as gifted.”

— Natalie Haynes

94. “She felt sorrow course through her: her purpose was to nurture and provide for men. But they kept taking more from her than she had to give. She looked out across the expanse and saw trees denuded of their fruits, fields ploughed until they could give up no more crops. Why could men not just be less greedy, she wondered. Her sorrow morphed into irritation. And why could they not heed the lessons given to them by Zeus?”

— Natalie Haynes

95. “She is a woman of sexual potency who transforms from total passivity at the hands of Laius in her youth to something far more complicated, far harder to categorize, as she ages. No wonder it took the genius of Euripides to put words into her mouth.”

— Natalie Haynes

96. “Caesar’s final words, though, were not ‘Et tu, Brute?’, in spite of what Shakespeare would have you believe. He actually spoke his last words in Greek: ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – ‘Even you, my son?”

— Natalie Haynes

97. “Euryale tends every one of her sheep like it is a child. Sthenno learned to cook so she could feed me when I was little. They care about me and protect me. That is beauty.”

— Natalie Haynes

98. “But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted.”

— Natalie Haynes

99. “The old did not die like the young. Even their blood was slower.”

— Natalie Haynes

100. “Zeus may wish us ill, in other words, but that doesn’t mean Pandora herself is evil, any more than the lightning which Zeus hurls at those of us who displease him is evil. Lightning is neutral, neither good nor bad, however much we fear it. Perhaps we can accept that Pandora is the same, unless we choose to see her otherwise.”

— Natalie Haynes