Bacchae Dionysus Greek Tragedy Quotes

Receive the god into your kingdom
pour libations, cover your head with ivy, join the dance! ~ Euripides

The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Greek tragedy was pre-Freudian, so every emotion has to be so raw; there are no psychological undertones. ~ Lydia Leonard

Listen, Kafka. What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results. ~ Haruki Murakami

No one will ever make necessity not happen. ~ Anne Carson

In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb. ~ Dennis Lehane

What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth? ~ Euripides

The tragedy of Eliot Spitzer is almost Greek: Ascendant son of wealth and privilege dedicates his life to social justice, warns of the corruption lurking among us, and falls victim to his inner demons at the very moment of vindication. ~ Wil S. Hylton

Well,the hell with you." She natched up her purse. "The hell with both of you."
"We love you, Margo."
That stopped her.She whirled back to glare at Kate. "That's a lousy thing to say.Bitch." When Kate grinned,she tried to grin back.Instead she dropped her purse back behind the counter and burst into tears.
"Oh,shit." Shocked,Kate leaped forward to gather her close. "Oh,hell.Oh, shit.Lock the door,Laura.I'm sorry, Margo.I'm sorry.Bad plan.I thought you'd just get mad and go tearing off to fix his butt.What did the bastard do to you,honey?I'll fix his butt for you."
"He dumped me." Thoroughly ashamed, she sobbed wretchedly on Kate's shoulder. "He hates me.I wish he were dead.I wish I had slept with Claudio."
"Wait.Whoa." Firmly, Kate drew he back,while Laura brought over a cup of tea.
"Who's Claudio and when didn't you sleep with him?"
"He's a friend,just a friend.And I never slept with him." The tears were so hot it felt as though her eyes were on fire. "Especially not when Josh found us in the bedroom."
"Uh-oh."
Kate rolled her eyes at Laura. "Is it a French farce or a Greek tragedy?You be the judge."
"Shut up,Kate.Come on Margo.Let's sit down.This time you tell us everything. ~ Nora Roberts

Laughter and weeping, the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, mark the extremes of a continuous spectrum; both provide channels for the overflow of emotion; both are ~ Arthur Koestler

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Yes, blood for blood, his bitter loan came due. He paid with death. ~ Euripides

People try to make a Greek tragedy of my life, and they can't do it. I'm too happy. ~ Curt Flood

Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own - the Dionysus of The Bacchae ~ Rene Girard

Among others, yes. There were some Egyptian gods worshipped there too." Lourds grinned. "One of the most interesting pieces is the Stoivadeion, the temple dedicated to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. It's a giant phallus." The two soldiers in the front of the boat totally lost it and started laughing hysterically. Even Fitrat laughed, and he wiped his eyes. "Who would do such a thing?" "It was erected - if I may be so bold - " The soldiers howled with glee. " - by an ancient Greek grammarian named Carystius. Sadly, this phallus is practically all that remains of his works. Even that is broken." "Broken?" The young soldier in the front seat turned around again. He had changed to speaking English. "Yes. In half." "So now it's half-cocked? Is that how you say this in your slang?" The soldier laughed and pounded his thigh with a fist. "Yes." Lourds covered his face with his hat and wanted to throw himself overboard. ~ Charles Brokaw

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today, erected on cheap colored labor and raising raw material for manufacture. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Trust my folly then, since it is best
for a man truly wise to be thought a fool. ~ Aeschylus

I gave them hope, and so turned away their eyes from death ~ Aeschylus

It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded. ~ Oscar Wilde

You are young and young your rule and you think that the tower in which you live is free from sorrow: from it have I not seen two tyrants thrown? The third, who now is king, I shall yet live to see him fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored. ~ Aeschylus

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy. ~ Walter Lord

Who can stop grief's avalanche once it starts to roll. ~ Euripides

Old loves are dropped when new ones come ~ Euripides

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama. ~ Lillian Hellman

Wonderful, Annabeth thought. Her own mother, the most levelheaded Olympian, was reduced to a raving, vicious scatterbrain in a subway station. And, of all the gods who might help them, the only ones not affected by the Greek-Roman schism seemed to be Aphrodite, Nemesis and Dionysus. Love, revenge, wine. Very helpful. ~ Rick Riordan

I'm running out of time, and a Western is America's answer to a Greek tragedy, so that's what we did. [Kiefer] hired Brad [Mirman] to write the script and he had the ideas, and then he and I did stuff on the script to make it a little cleaner to ourselves. And then, we played it. We were just actors working together, and our DNA must have informed it somehow. Certainly, we came out of it purified a little bit. ~ Donald Sutherland

Hero," said Machaon to his sister who was still muttering to her gods. "Please stop. Surely the gods would have heard you by now … let's try not to annoy them. ~ Sulari Gentill

I am Cassandra - she who, without asking,
understood it all and still came to her fate,
I, Cassandra, full of visions,
who sees her own death without turning away,
and hears in the night the day that follows. ~ Gabriela Mistral

I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once. ~ Euripides

The hounds snap fierce at your heels. Turn toward Athens. I hear them pelting hard on you, I see black flesh and snake-hands coiling round a fruit of agonizing pain. ~ Euripides

In Euripedes's The Bacchae...Dionysus dispenses food, drink and comfort, and inspires communal energy, song and dance; he is rapture and rage, illumination and blindness. ~ Anya Taylor

For my money, noir boils down to bleak humanism – or, to put it more plainly: shit options, bad decisions, and dire
consequences. The difference between Greek tragedy and noir ain't the height of the fall, but the reason: those who fall in Greek tragedy do so because they're destined to; those who fall in noir choose to their damn selves.

In short, free will's a bitch.
But regardless of whose definition you go with, you'll notice something's lacking: namely, any mention of genre. That's because for as much as noir's assumed to be a subset of crime fiction, it's more vibe than subgenre. And, as many an enterprising modern writer seems intent on proving, that vibe is one that plays just as well with fantasy and science fiction as it does with crime. ~ Chris Holm

We all know what tragedy is. "Yes, I'd rather not have any more tragedy, please. I'll have comedy, please." Comedy, in the Greek sense, only means that it has a happy ending. ~ Eric Drooker

Again, again your mind has changed course with the wind. For you think now of godly things ignored when you worked dreadful deeds on your brother against his will. ~ Euripides

I've come to realize that life is not a musical comedy, it's a Greek tragedy. ~ Billy Joel

In some ways grief anonymizes as powerfully as a Greek tragedy mask. ~ Tana French

Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream. ~ Euripides

Ten thousand men possess ten thousand hopes. A few bear fruit in happiness; the others go awry. But he who garners day by day the good life, he is happiest. ~ Gilbert Murray

The theater of man is not always 'amusing', but it is always theater, and theater can be marveled at even when its content is somber and harsh. You're acquainted with Greek tragedy? ~ Tom Robbins

Fate has always been the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it.
In ancient Greek mythology, the Three Sisters of Fate spin out a person's destiny within three nights of their birth. Imagine your newborn child in his nursery. It's dark and soft and warm, somewhere between two and four a.m., one of those hours that belong exclusively to the newly born or the dying.
The first sister - Clotho - appears next to you. She's a maiden, young and smooth. In her hands she holds a spindle, and on it she spins the thrads of your child's life.
Next to her is Lachesis, older and more matronly than her sister. In her hands, she holds the rod used to mesure the thread of life. The length and destiny of your child's life is in her hands.
Finally we have Atropos - old, haggardly. Inevitable. In her hands she holds the terrible shears she'll use to cut the thread of your child's life. She determines the time and manner of his or her death.
Imagine the awesome and awful sight of these three sisters pressed together, presiding over his crib, dermining his future.
In modern times, the sisters have largely disappeared from the collective consiousness, but the idea of Fate hasn't. Why do we still believe? Does itmake tragedy more bearable to believe that we ourselves had no hand in it, that we couldn't have prevented it? It was always ever thus.
Things happen for a reason, says Natasha's mother. What she means is Fate has a Reason and, though yo ~ Nicola Yoon

Of most dreadful suffering, I am the cause. ~ Euripides