Sally Rooney Quotes

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ileum?

The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.

I was more worn out with the "Odyssey" than it was with the "Iliad." I mean, just comparing those two - you can see how it's changing, how the language of the "Iliad" is somehow monstrously new - and that language of the "Odyssey" is more comfortable, even for us.

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.

When I was an adolescent in England, at school we had to read 'Death of a Salesman.' I remember feeling incredibly moved by the portrayal of these people and the idea with which Miller broached the whole subject of failure or failed systems, or the way that people are crushed by a system in which they find themselves.

I read The Odyssey all the time. I always get something out of it.

It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey.

I think they went with the idea that people know the story pretty much- knowing that he's going to take her when she's going to go with him. Also, the movie is really focused on Achilles and Hector and their battles.

It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war.

I get letters from college kids who have read Percy Jackson when they were younger who tell me, 'I just passed my Classics exam.' The books are accurate enough that they can serve as a gateway to Homer and Virgil.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

Shakespeare's idea of the tragic fact is larger than this idea and goes beyond it; but it includes it, and it is worth while to observe the identity of the two in a certain point which is often ignored.

For all the import and message of 'The Iliad,' it's ultimately a story that's meant to be heard, and the person hearing 'The Iliad' determines what it means.

In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.

I'd read 'Paradise Lost' as an undergrad at university but remembered little about it. No, not true: I remembered few details, but carried with me with the persuasive arguments and pitiable dilemma of its arguable protagonist, Satan.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

Tragedy is formed 'round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is, in some part, to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it.

I can't measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world's most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.

'Troy' is an adaptation of the Trojan War myth in its entirety, not 'The Iliad' alone. 'The Iliad' begins with the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon over the slave girl Briseis nine years into the war. The equivalent scene occurs halfway through my script.

Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.

Why can't death - if we must have it - be always glorious, as in 'The Iliad?'