Top 150 Natalie Haynes Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “It is the ultimate story about the power of music to change hearts and minds.”

— Natalie Haynes

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “Perhaps still more disquieting to modern eyes even than the thousands of disenfranchised women and resident foreigners is the fact that Athens could not have had its democratic systems if it hadn’t also had slavery.”

— Natalie Haynes

124. “She watched as Poseidon chased one giant right off the plain and into the sea. Athene rolled her eyes. What kind of idiot tried to evade Poseidon by running into the sea?”

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

127. “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

128. “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

129. “Men often kill for trophies.”

— Natalie Haynes

130. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Natalie Haynes

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

— Natalie Haynes

147. “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

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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