The Hymn to Dionysus

He’s like wine. If you describe what he does, he seems awful, but if it’s happening to you, it’s lovely.” “There speaks an intoxicated man.

Suffering doesn't make people good or noble. A little bit gives them perspective. A lot turns them cruel, and too much - you get a murder or a marvel, and neither of those are really people any more.

I’d have known what that meant, when I was young,” he said, sounding strange, and sad. “Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don’t speak any more?” That hit me deeper than I expected. “All the time. What is it?” “I’ve forgotten,” he said, apologetic.

If you’re sitting there saying, Oh, no, what a dreadful thing to tell children, then you can fuck off to Athens and enjoy their puke-inducing happily-ever-after stories where everyone prances joyfully off into the joyful sunset like demented morons. It is not a proper story unless everyone murders each other at the end.

Our duty is part of us, we can’t just leave it on the side of the road." Pentheus thought about it for a little while. He had his hair over his shoulder on his sun side to keep his neck from burning, and with the gold beads threaded through into their half-crown, he looked like Helios. “I thought that too. But then... when I was in the maze, duty didn’t feel like a part of me at all. It was just chains. I suppose if you’re born in chains and so is everyone you know and you never, ever see them come off, then you would think they were part of you and something awful would happen if you found the key, but it didn’t feel awful. I felt like I could breathe.

What you say will matter. Negotiate. Be Persephone. If you see Death coming, say, Fantastic, you’re coming with me, and I’m Queen.

Do you know about friends? It’s when you keep talking to another person for a good while but neither of you sets the other one on fire.

When someone is that calm in a crisis, either they don’t know what’s happening, or you don’t.

felt like an old candle that had sat forgotten on a shelf for years, frozen into the same lumpy awkward shape, dull with dust, but now here was the fire again, and I was softening and changing and finding I didn’t have to be that cold shape forever, and the wax was turning warm and bright again. He’d burn me away altogether before long, but it was worth it.

I’ll tell you about rage, and a complicated man.

Do you ever feel like your whole life happened to you in languages you don't speak anymore?

Sometimes you just have to admit you’re in a storm and stop trying to make any difference to where you’re going. The wind is the wind, and Poseidon is mighty.

It was such a small thing, but somewhere, behind the world, something went in a great ledger, and something mighty took notice.

Humans are weird animals; partly we’re wild, and partly we are clockwork. Unholy devices, all of us—mechanisms bolted onto bone.

I think many of his stories, though, come down to one fundamental idea: neglect catharsis, and you’ll go mad.

The Queen was watching us. I had a feeling she found it distasteful that I was being gentle with him. I watched her back, and wondered how different she would have been, if someone had been kind to her at the right moment. I wanted to say, Trust me, I know how to build a human. This is how Helios built me.

His duty was hurting him, and this is the medicine, and the only reason you think that’s unreasonable is that your duty has hurt you much more, there never was medicine for you, and you don’t see why other people shouldn’t be hurt the same way.

Your training isn’t armour, it’s anaesthetic!" He didn’t raise his voice, but there was rage under it, hot as the glass in the crater of the fallen star. He let his breath out and the fight seemed to go out of him at the same time. His focus slipped to the air somewhere between us. "So the function of the mad god is to break your mind, before your mind breaks your soul. Pharmakeia.

Exactly like it had with Tiresias, the well-greaved and garrison-trained part of me snorted and said, Don’t be ridiculous. Only Athenians and hysterics talk like that. That made me fall still. I’d always listened to that voice. It had been armour against so many things: idiot decadences and superstition, laziness, the urge to abandon duty when it was inconvenient. It was my favourite part of me. I was proud of it. Nothing could get through it. Now, though – it was getting in the way. A god was talking to me, and I couldn’t understand, because of that bronze helmet that I’d forgotten how to take off, and the visor that wouldn’t hinge up.

Normal humans who live in proximity sometimes give things to each other; it’s a way of saying you’d like to be friends if it isn’t too inconvenient. Do you know about friends? It’s when you keep talking to another person for a good while but neither of you sets the other one on fire.

Belief never made a god, and nor did sacrifice. They just are." "What do you mean?" It sounded close to heresy. "Well – Poseidon is the sea, and the tide won’t stop rising just because no one sacrifices to him. Time is there, death is there, the earth, war, love. Even if there is some terrible place three thousand years from now where nobody remembers any gods at all, there will still be the sea and love…" His eyes slipped to the knights again. Even behind the veil, they were starry with the lamplight. "And madness. People will have just forgotten how to talk to them.

Sometimes, you have a conversation between two mirrors. Instead of talking to just one person, you talk to versions and versions of them, reflected back and back. Maybe I was talking to a good witch. Maybe I was talking to a thing that had screamed down from the sky and made itself into a man from the cinders. Maybe he knew I was wondering about it, and maybe he didn’t, and maybe he would laugh if I asked him, or maybe he would lose interest and I’d be a pillar of fire. Among all the reflections, I couldn’t tell which one was really him.

It is not a proper story unless everyone murders each other at the end.

Things had seemed a bit too much earlier, but sometimes what you need to remember is that everything is fine as long as you aren’t currently on fire.

Five women went into labour at the same time; five. I don’t know why Apollo built humans to give birth if they’ve had a shock, it seems impractical, then you’ll be running away from a lion and having a baby, but he did.

And it was hard not to feel as though, for all they were saying words we couldn’t understand, this was what you would make if you weren’t building something for now, but for people living a thousand years after your language had been forgotten. That was the only reason to do this, instead of just carving it on the city walls. If you carved it, you expected someone to be able to read it.

Someone in this crowd, maybe even someone I knew, wasn’t a human being at all.

Holy archer, lord of marvels Bless this day and all who call you here.