Top 150 Natalie Haynes Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It seems that Clytemnestra seals her own fate when she values her daughter’s life equally to the life of a king.”

— Natalie Haynes

102. “As is always the way with Ovid, his capacity for irony is so subtle and comprehensive that it is difficult to know how sincere or cheeky he is being at any given moment.”

— Natalie Haynes

103. “That is what mortals do: first they ask, then they beg, finally they bargain.”

— Natalie Haynes

104. “The greatest virtue, in other words, that an Athenian woman could aspire to was not to be registered, almost not to exist.”

— Natalie Haynes

105. “Are they beautiful?′ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘Why?’ ‘Because they are young and happy and together,’ she said.”

— Natalie Haynes

106. “There really is nothing like Greek myth for reminding us that the countryside is rarely the blissful idyll for young women that it is for young men and gods. More frequently it is the source of sexual threat and constant anxiety.”

— Natalie Haynes

107. “In perhaps one of the greatest digital curatorial comments in any museum in the world, the Cleveland Museum of Art website used to list the description of the pot – ‘Here Medea flees the scene after murdering her children on a flying serpent-pulled chariot’ – under the heading, ‘Fun Fact’.45 I salute this curator.”

— Natalie Haynes

108. “I see everything but I don’t know everything.”

— Natalie Haynes

109. “While we might say that we have fallen in love or developed a crush on someone unsuitable, the Greeks tended to externalize the causes of such experiences. We fall in love, they were struck by an arrow shot by the god Eros, for example. A sophisticated language of psychology simply didn’t exist at the time that Euripides was writing, so things which are internalized for us were often launched upon a Greek from without.”

— Natalie Haynes

110. “Her later life was lived amid a set of shadows and reflections of all that she had lost in the catastrophes of her early life. And if the shadow of happiness fell short of happiness itself, it was more than she had ever expected to find when she lay prostrate on the shores of Troy, weeping for her beloved child.”

— Natalie Haynes

111. “Can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying? Perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty.”

— Natalie Haynes

112. “She was the earth, she was meant to give life and sustain it.”

— Natalie Haynes

113. “All the epic themes covered: war, love, sea-snakes.”

— Natalie Haynes

114. “The failure of his mission is assured from the moment he undertakes it. There is something cripplingly true about this, isn’t there? That we are so often the authors of our own misfortunes because of the same qualities which makes us brave, or hopeful, or loving in the first place. This Orpheus hasn’t been gripped by madness, he has been afflicted by fear. And because the fear eventually overwhelms him, the thing he feared comes true.”

— Natalie Haynes

115. “Actually, he says, the opposite is true. People will come to depend on writing, which is external, and stop using memory, which is internal. In fact, writing will make us forgetful. It is typical of Plato–using the character of his tricksy mentor, Socrates–to construct a written argument dismissing the value of writing.”

— Natalie Haynes

116. “Jocasta had never enjoyed being married to her husband more than at his funeral.”

— Natalie Haynes

117. “In many ways, she preferred life in this bustling little home – always full of women and children and food and laundry spilling outside to bleach in the sun – to the empty life she had known in the palace.”

— Natalie Haynes

118. “But somehow, he coined an idea which has echoed through the centuries. Everything used to be okay, but then a single, irreversible bad decision was made, and now we all live with the consequences forever.”

— Natalie Haynes

119. “No sea god would want to feel so weakened. A shudder ran through Sthenno as she thought of what she had lost: the sweet sense of owning herself and her feelings, of having no concerns at all, or only the very mildest kind. All of this was gone, exchanged without warning for a cold, gripping panic whenever a child stumbled or hid or cried. This, she knew, was love. And she felt it even though she did not want it.”

— Natalie Haynes

120. “This poem throbs with rage, as though Eurydice has waited a couple of millennia to get all this off her chest. But it does not end in anger; it ends with a declaration: ‘hell must break before I am lost,’ she says, in the final stanza. Eurydice may be dead, but she is still triumphantly herself.”

— Natalie Haynes

121. “Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life.”

— Natalie Haynes

122. “The Greeks invented almost every literary form: tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, philosophical dialogue, biography. It’s no accident that the names of these genres are all Greek in origin. In contrast, the Romans invented only one literary form: satire.”

— Natalie Haynes

123. “So this is my answer to that question prompted by Xenophanes. When women make art like men do, their goddesses look divine.”

— Natalie Haynes

124. “Anger at the loss of a fellow warrior – and revenge killing of the man responsible – motivates heroes throughout epic poetry.”

— Natalie Haynes

125. “So you’re homesick for somewhere you’ve never been?”

— Natalie Haynes

126. “Now, where was I? Or rather, where were you? You’re at the furthest point you can sail to, where the ocean kisses the setting sun. It is beautiful and sad at once: it holds none of the promises that dawn brings if you journey the opposite way. It is a place where things come to an end. Mortals don’t belong here: it makes them melancholy.”

— Natalie Haynes

127. “It is an astonishing image. No wonder so many musicians and composers have been tempted to take on this story. Even the thought of it makes me shiver: music so beautiful that the dead cry when they hear it.”

— Natalie Haynes

128. “We like to be able to separate heroes, villains, and victims. It’s convenient for a simple narrative, but it isn’t always reflective of the truth.”

— Natalie Haynes

129. “It is the ultimate story about the power of music to change hearts and minds.”

— Natalie Haynes

130. “He cursed himself for the way he had tried to show the king he was a man, when he still felt like a child.”

— Natalie Haynes

131. “Hera found herself in the upsetting position of being worried about her husband. She had no experience of this: the greatest threat to Zeus’s wellbeing was usually her.”

— Natalie Haynes

132. “Who decides what is a monster?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Medusa. ‘Men, I suppose.”

— Natalie Haynes

133. “From Persephone’s perspective, these two deities are – as the Greek text makes plain – essentially the same. One god rapes her, the other agrees to it.”

— Natalie Haynes

134. “A woman is filled with fear, she is a coward when it comes to war. But mistreat her in the bedroom, and no one is more bloodthirsty.”

— Natalie Haynes

135. “And while I am all in favour of using precision to describe something, might I suggest that you would be better off not doing something so dangerous so often that you need a specific word for it? Perhaps develop your self-control rather than your vocabulary.”

— Natalie Haynes

136. “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

137. “But Zeus loved her. He was proud of his clever, argumentative daughter, and often took her side in disputes with the other gods. And since Athene would always rather be right than happy, and would rather win than be right, this worked out well for everyone.”

— Natalie Haynes

138. “The more time you spend examining these stories of Hera’s bad behaviour, the more reasons you tend to be able to find for why she might be behaving unreasonably, or why someone else is the guilty party but blaming Hera is so convenient. It is a misogynist narrative as old as time itself, and never out of fashion:.”

— Natalie Haynes

139. “There is peace here, as there always is by the sea. Even for those who have come, as Medusa did, to hate it.”

— Natalie Haynes

140. “Would it kill you to be sympathetic about someone who isn’t as fortunate as you are? Would it?”

— Natalie Haynes

141. “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

142. “But I can’t help wondering if there is some sort of recognition for the idea that female gods–who held power and autonomy that female humans were not permitted to have–might well not want a male partner.”

— Natalie Haynes

143. “Crowds are curious things: made up of individuals, but with a character entirely their own.”

— Natalie Haynes

144. “But Athene was no musician, and nor was she looking to play a tune. The first flute therefore sounded exactly like what it was – a reed that has been severed from it’s root.”

— Natalie Haynes

145. “Calliope, Muse of epic poetry; Clio, Muse of history; Thalia, Muse of comedy; Terpsichore, Muse of dance; Melpomene, Muse of tragedy. Clio holds a scroll to represent history, and Melpomene carries a tragedy mask.”

— Natalie Haynes

146. “There was something displeasing about mortals, which the gods never spoke about, because they all knew it to be true. They had a strange smell – faint, when they were young, ripening to a stench as they grew old – but always present. It was the odour of death. Even the healthy ones, the uninjured, even children had it, this invisible, indelible mark.”

— Natalie Haynes

147. “If the man who sleeps upstairs in the bed he once carved from an old olive tree is an impostor, I suppose I will find out soon enough. He knows the old stories of our marriage, of that I am certain. And Telemachus is devoted to him, which is fortunate. So perhaps it does not matter if he is the man who left, or a changed man, or even another man altogether. He fits in the space that Odysseus left.”

— Natalie Haynes

148. “At first, he was almost torn apart by dogs. He had forgotten – of course he had – that the swineherd’s dogs were not the same ones that had barked at strangers when he was last on Ithaca. Dogs cannot wait as long as wives: these hounds were the pups of the pups of the original dogs, I should think.”

— Natalie Haynes

149. “Mankind was just so impossibly heavy. There were so many of them and they showed no sign of halting their endless reproduction. Stop, she wanted to cry out, please stop. You cannot all fit on the space between the oceans, you cannot grow enough food on the land beneath the mountains. You cannot graze enough livestock on the grasses around your cities, you cannot build enough homes on the peaks of your hills. You must stop, so that I can rest beneath your ever-increasing weight.”

— Natalie Haynes

150. “Her Amazons were bright jewels of the mountainous north, glittering in these lowlands. They would defend a city none had ever set eyes upon until yesterday, and they would protect women and children they had never met.”

— Natalie Haynes