Medusa: The Girl Behind the Myth

I was lonely and I was angry, and rage and loneliness can end up tasting the same.

It's the hardest thing in the world to explain yourself, to tell your story clearly.

You see, remembering's a blessing and a curse. You can't erase your bad memories, but a life without regrets is a life unlived. What you remember and how you remember: it makes you who you are. Maybe you have a choice about that, maybe you don't.

She was a woman who’d done nothing wrong except exist.” “Except exist,” I echoed in a whisper.

The Medusa. What did he mean, the Medusa? My name was Medusa, and I was a girl. Perseus had made me sound like a mythical beast. I didn't want to be a myth. I wanted to be me.

Sometimes, not even folding yourself into the smallest, littlest shape is enough. So you might as well stay the size you're supposed to be

When you're a girl, people think your beauty is their possession.

I'm a half-finished map and I'm always trying to plot my points, and I won't have anyone do it for me.

I'd never known a change that wasn't monstrous.

I'd been scared of other people's power my whole life, never mind my own.

A life without regrets is a life unlived.

Love had been a ghost for so long.

Perseus, when you're a girl, people think your beauty is their possession. As if it's there for their pleasure, as if they've got something invested in it. They think you owe them for their admiration. Look at your mother and how Zeus behaved to her, breaking through her window. The effort to maintain your outward appearance in order to keep people happy, and the fear if you don't do it, are exhausting. You, on the other hand, can do what you like. You got on your boat and went sailing on a little trip, and no one stopped you. You could take that face of yours away and keep it for the dolphins, if you wanted. Not me. I wasn't allowed.

A myth finds a way to remember itself. It makes a new shape, rising out of a shallow grave in glory.

I was in possession of my own story. I was the one who could either keep it or discard it.

I thought of what it might mean to have a boy admire you, not for how you looked, but for who you were. For your thoughts and your deeds, your fears and your dreams. Was such a miracle to be my inheritance? To know I was treasured, adored and celebrated; to be allowed, encouraged to shine, to feel perfect in the majestic mirror of someone else's gaze - could such a life ever be mine?

When beauty is assigned you as a girl, it somehow becomes the essence of your being. It takes over everything else you might be. When you're a boy, it never dominates who you can be.

It had to be Athena. Athena is a bitch.

This island is haunted, but by something far more powerful than a witch: my story, my exile, the reason I am here. It was I who echoed in these rocks and pathways, inside the roofs of these caves. It was my memories that acted as signposts to draw Perseus in my direction, but what might happen when he reached his final destination?

Never mind being born with a silver spoon in his mouth; try a golden shovel. It was one thing we did not have in common. I grew up in happy obscurity under the moon, but Perseus had been drenched by the strongest beam of sun.

As your life unfurls, what makes you sure your reasons are the right ones? You don't ever know for sure. You're simply trying to survive.

I heard their wings opening, their bodies rising - bodies which they loved as much as I hated mine. I envied them that confidence with such ferocity that my snakes turned to red-hot pokers spanning my skull. I was trapped; I was the one person I could never escape.

As far as I'm concerned, it's up to you whether or not to believe what other people predict for your future. People will always have their own motives

Self-awareness is a great banisher of loneliness.

Your life to come's a sum for which you do not know the answer.

But you can’t start a fresh chapter until you’ve ended the old one.

I was not going to let him destroy me for who I was, or who he thought I was, for his own ends. It was simply unacceptable

Sometimes,' I said, 'life just seems like a series of endless questions that you really don't want to answer. And you can live that, for a while. For a while you can pretend you're deaf to the voice inside you. You can pretend to be someone you're not. You can pretend that the thoughts you're having, or the way you're feeling, aren't really true