Sheri S. Tepper · 315 pages
Rating: (10.1K votes)
“HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?
(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“Stavia saw herself as in a picture, from the outside, a darkly cloaked figure moving along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“along a cobbled street, the stones sheened with a soft, early spring rain. On either side the gutters ran with an infant chuckle and gurgle, baby streams being amused with themselves. The”
― Sheri S. Tepper, quote from The Gate to Women's Country
“For a moment, all I could think of was my cousin Peter. He was twice my age—and married. By the rules of decent, he would be the one to inherit the Rothford title if I died without children. Whenever he was in town, he'd stop by and ask how I was feeling”
― Richelle Mead, quote from The Glittering Court
“I figured something out. You can't hold onto hate forever. It won't do a thing to the person you hate, but it'll poison you, sure enough.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Ship of the Dead
“Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quote from Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
“It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? […] We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”
― Charles Darwin, quote from Voyage of the Beagle
“Exactly what I said: she’s still a child in many ways, so she’s discovering all the fine and noble causes for the first time, and she still sees each one as a discrete unit: she hasn’t seen the connections or contradictions among them; not yet.’ She”
― Donna Leon, quote from Blood from a Stone
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