Underworld Journey Quotes

For whence did Dante take the materials for his hell but from this our actual world? And yet he made a very proper hell of it.

But how do we even get to the land of the dead?” I asked. “I mean…without dying.

The descent to Hades is the same from every place.

For a single path leads to the house of Hades.

I too have been in the underworld, as was Odysseus, and I will often be there again; not only sheep have I sacrificed so as to beable to speak with a few dead souls, but neither have I spared my own blood as well.

You see, I needed to go to Hell.

In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

When Dante described the circles of Hell, he clearly forgot the one where a hungry pixie sits on one's shoulder for eternity.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch! Let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark.

Few tyrants go down to the infernal regions by a natural death.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

I was already headed for Hell, I might as well enjoy the ride.

A great model for this is the way that Dante calls on Virgil at the beginning of 'The Inferno,' 'The Divine Comedy,' to help guide him through the underworld.

The descent into Hades is much the same from whatever place we start.

Death is ... a travelling asunder into elemental chaos. And from the elemental chaos all is cast forth again into creation. Therefore death also is but a cul-de-sac, a melting-pot.

Into the eternal darkness, into fire and into ice.