Ariadne Quotes

“I held Medusa's image in my head, calming my deep ragged breaths. Her snakes hissed and spat and contorted about her head, striking fear into the hearts of so-called heroes as they cringed away. I could be the same. My rage would be my shield.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Every woman alive knows that the journey through birth is a voyage between life and death, for her and the infant alike.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a mans actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes and the world would shrink from me instead.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“If you had anything that made you proud, that elevated you above your mortal fellows, it seemed to me that the gods would find delight in smashing it to smithereens.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Feeling like the last two people in the world was thrilling; feeling like the only one was terrifying.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Mortals. They are often so stubborn, so determined not to see reason. Everyone should live as easily as we do on Naxos, instead of making these endless traps in which to ensnare themselves. They are the cause of their own suffering, and yet they will never see it. They will rage against the gods all day long, and pray to them and plea for their mercy in the darkness of night. But they will never see how simply they could make their lives better for themselves.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I knew it was a king's duty to hold up the sky for his citizens, to prevent them from being crushed beneath it, no matter how much his back may buckle or his muscles scream for mercy.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“My story would not be one of death and suffering and sacrifice. I would take my own place in the songs that would be sung about Theseus: the princess who saved him and ended the monstrosity that blighted Crete.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“What the gods liked was ferocity, savagery, the snarl and the bite and the fear. Always, always the fear, the naked edge of it behind the smoke rising from the altars, the high note of it in the muttered prayers and praise we sent heavenward, the deep, primal taste of it when we raised the knife above the sacrificial offering. Our fear. That was how the gods grew great.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“More than anything, I knew that I did not want to be drawn into that circle, that I did not want to take my place amongst them and forget who I was.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Her eyes locked on to mine. I had thought they would be green, like the cold reptilian flesh that wriggled from her scalp. But they were blue: a cloudless sky, a calm ocean. An ever-replenishing well of sorrow; a sapphire melancholy of surprising gentleness.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The bridges were burned behind me and I could not make my way back across the ashes any more than I could walk on the trail of moonlight cast across the water.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“but I foamed with anger for Minos as well and even for Poseidon – these men, these gods who toyed with our lives and cast us aside when we had been of use to them, who laughed at our suffering or forgot our existence altogether.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The gods would take what they wanted, whenever they wanted it.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“the world was on fire, and theseus was a shaded green pool.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“He was that impossibly rare thing – a man who was exactly who he presented himself to be.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Tears would be useless, an insult to a suffering deeper than the farthest abyss of the ocean.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Being a god and loving mortals means nothing more than watching them die.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“But when I thought of Scylla, I thought of the foolish and all-too-human girl, gasping for breath amid the froth of waves churning in the wake of my father’s boat. I saw her weighed down in the tumultuous water not just by the iron chains in which my father had bound her but also by the terrible truth that she had sacrificed everything she knew for a love as ephemeral and transient as the rainbows that glimmered through the sea spray.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The world was bathed in gold as I reached my dancing-floor. The stillness of dawn was breaking to the stirring of life, to the high, fluting notes of the songbirds and the ripple of warmth that promised the heat of the day to come.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The gods do not know love because they cannot imagine an end to anything they enjoy. Their passions do not burn brightly as a mortal's passions do, because they can have whatever they desire for the rest of eternity. How could they cherish or treasure anything? Nothing to them is more than a passing amusement and when they have done with it, there will be another and another and another, until the end of time itself.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“He showed me that he was truly the best of all men, of all gods. It was not just his stories; I had fallen for tales woven in the moonlight before and knew better than to trust a man’s account of himself.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“How they would exult in my disgrace. A fallen woman is the sweetest entertainment they know;”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“They are the cause of their own suffering, and yet they will never see it. They will rage against the gods all day long, and pray to them and plead for their mercy in the darkness of night. But they will never see how simply they could make their lives better for themselves.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“for the first time in my life the men who wielded the power stopped courteously to let me talk.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Despite his soldiers and his axes, he seemed suddenly to be nothing more than an angry child, squalling and stamping because his favorite toy had been taken away.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The pampered gods of Mount Olympus shrink from the darkness of Hades' realm...None of them, accustomed as they are to drinking nectar and feasting on ambrosia upon their couches, wreathed in golden purity and all the luxury of their world, would think to walk those dim, dank tunnels sloping ever deeper underground, full of crawling insects and slithering worms and scuttling creatures. But I was not like them and I did not fear the dark.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“The price we paid for the resentment, the lust, and the greed of arrogant men was our pain, shining and bright like the blade of a newly honed knife.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I had given Theseus the clue to the Labyrinth, fourteen lives of Athens, and the death of my own brother. In exchange, he granted me perhaps a week to live in exile, imprisoned on a desolate island.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne