Helen Of Troy Quotes

I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property are devastatingly temporary. All she had to do was lie down for a prince. They burned the city to the ground. ~ Brenna Yovanoff

No. I came here to see you. I didn't believe the rumors,but after hearing it on so many continents I had to come andsee for myself."
"See what?"
His eyes widened in adulation, his voice taking on areverent tone. "If it was true that Helen of Troy, nay, Aphrodite herself had been reincarnated in gym teacher form."
The room was utterly silent. Except Vicious Redhead's jaw dropping to the ground with a little plink. Or maybe I imagined that. And then the class did the worst thingpossible: They started giggling. Miss Lynn was going tomurder me. ~ Kiersten White

But she's only a woman!" The watch captain shook his head again. "So was Helen of Troy, sir. Look what she started. ~ Ruth Downie

Helen of Troy, a hooker from Upstate New York. Never got a dinner! ~ Red Buttons

And the dagger?" "Is that really -?"
"Katoptris," Piper said proudly. "Belonged to Helen of Troy."
I yelped. "You have Helen of Troy's dagger? Where did you find it?"
Piper shrugged. "In a shed at camp."
I felt like pulling out my hair. I remembered the day Helen received that dagger as a wedding present. Such a gorgeous blade, held by the most beautiful woman ever to walk the earth. (No offence to the billions of other women out there who are also quite enchanting; I love you all.) And Piper had found this historically significant, well-crafted, powerful weapon in a shed?
Alas, time makes bric-a-brac of everything, no matter how important. ~ Rick Riordan

The stories abounded, both recounting these cross-continental journeys and perhaps inspiring them – how Hellenic Jason gathered his Argonauts together (including Augeas, whose vast stables Herakles would be forced to clean) for adventure and profit, how he stopped off along the Bosphorus and discovered the land of the rising sun before other Greek heroes headed to Asia in search of Helen, Troy and glory. In the Homeric epics we hear of Jason travelling east where he tangles with Medea of Colchis, her aunt Circe and the feisty Amazon tribe. Lured by the promise of gold (early and prodigious metalworking did indeed take place in the region – perhaps sparking the Greek idea that the East was 'rich in gold') and then detained by the potions and poisons of Princess Medea, Jason succeeded in penetrating the Caucasus – a land which, in the Greek mind, wept with both peril and promise. It was here that Prometheus was chained to a rock with iron rivets for daring to steal fire from the gods. Archaeology east of Istanbul demonstrates how myth grazes history. ~ Bettany Hughes

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was 'really like' are not questions that torture us. ~ Janet Malcolm

Look to your kingdoms -
I am coming for them all. ~ Elisabeth Hewer

First of all, there is no need to patronize me by implying that I'm Helen of Troy when it's clear that I'm no beauty. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy. ~ G. Willow Wilson

If the mitred bishops seen you that time, they'd be the like of the holy prophets, I'm thinking, do be straining the bars of Paradise to lay eyes on the Lady Helen of Troy, and she abroad, pacing back and forward, with a nosegay in her golden shawl. ~ J.M. Synge

Then she walked away, like Helen of Troy turning her back on Attica. A gust of warm wind blew newspapers along the boulevard into the sky. The light was orange and bleeding out of the clouds in the west, the horizon darkening, the waves crashing on the beach just the other side of Seawall Boulevard, the palm trees rattling dryly in the wind. I could smell the salt and the seaweed and the tiny shellfish that had dried on the beach, like the smell of birth. I ~ James Lee Burke

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. ~ Walter Pater

But here Billy Chope arrived to demand what the 'ell Sam Cardew was doing with his gal. Now Sam was ever readier for a fight than Billy was; but the sum of Billy's half pints was large: wherefore the fight began. On the skirt of a hilarious ring Lizerunt, after some small outcry, triumphed aloud. Four days before, she had no bloke; and here she stood with two, and those two fighting for her! Here in the public gaze, on the Flats! For almost five minutes she was Helen of Troy. ~ Arthur Morrison

His tone was odd, a mixture of restraint and subtle conviction. He did not make light of the question, nor did he attempt to couch his words in chivalrous courtesy. "He wants you, Marian."

She sighed. "So he says, when it is the lands he wants - "

"No." He cut her off. "DeLacey wants you."

She grimaced. "Because of what I have - "

"Because of what you are." She scowled at him.

"What am I, then? Sir Hugh FitzWalter's daughter, ward to King Richard - "

"Marian." His face was stripped free of the mask. What she saw now was blazing, naked emotion.

"What you are is a woman he wants very badly in bed. And I think he would do anything to make sure he gets you there." Her shocked denial was instantaneous. "Oh no - "

"Oh yes." She stared at him, undone by his conviction. This was nothing she had anticipated, this brutal, male truth. "I - don't understand ..." And she didn't, not really, not fully. She was only beginning to, and it frightened her very badly.

His smile was wintry. "I am not the one to explain in elaborate detail why a man, any man, might feel as deLacey does."

Why not?"

Robin sighed. "Helen of Troy."

It baffled her utterly. "What?"

"Helen of Troy. Have you no knowledge of the classics?"

"Of course I do; I was told all the stories. Helen was married to Menelaus of Sparta, until Paris of Troy cast his eyes ~ Jennifer Roberson

There are many different experiences that cause girls to relinquish their true selves. In early adolescence girls learn how important appearance is in defining social acceptability. Attractiveness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for girls' success. This is an old, old problem. Helen of Troy didn't launch a thousand ships because she was a hard worker. Juliet wasn't loved for her math ability. ~ Mary Pipher

She's unmarried but, as she confided early on to Judy, 'not short of offers'. Nelson often thinks that Jo is not nearly as attractive as she thinks she is but, as with all these things, her insane self-belief rubs off on others, and after a week King's Lynn police were treating her as if she were Helen of Troy. Her technique is divide and rule. ~ Elly Griffiths

What's the matter, Bob?"
"On." He looked at Aunt Judith, seeming embarrassed. "Well, actually, it just occurred to me that Elena
is a form of the name Helen. And for some reason I was thinking of Helen of Troy."
"Beautiful and doomed," said Bonnie happily. ~ L.J. Smith

I'm glad you still have your survival instinct."

"We've all got something." I lift my fingertips to the exposed skin on my face. It's colder than the night sea. Cupping my hands, I blow into them, let my breath warm my nose and cheeks. "I apparently still have a face, which is good."

Holden vaults up onto the wooden platform and I step up after him. "That is good," he says, pulling me in close. He lifts his gloved hands to my cheeks. "After all, this is one of my favorite faces."

I scrunch my lips into a pretend pout. "One of?"

He grins. "Well, you know. I'm a sucker for the classics. Helen of Troy, the Mona Lisa, that - "

"Hey. The Mona Lisa isn't even hot." I give him a little shove away from me, toward the edge of the platform.

"Disagree," Holden says. "She's beautiful in her own way. That mischievous smile, those dark, soulful eyes, the way she - "

"Fine, whatever." I cross my arms. "But I insist on being ranked above her."

"Okay, okay," Holden says. "Yours can be my second-favorite face . . . right after that guy from The Scream." He pulls me in close again.

"You're such an ass," I say, as our lips touch.

Holden laughs. "My girl Mona Lisa would never be so rude. ~ Paula Stokes

Enough wars have been started over this face. My face. My curse - and my mother's curse, and her mother's curse, and so on all the way back to the first woman to ever wear this face. Helen of Troy. ~ Josephine Angelini

If Helen of Troy could have been seen eating peppermints out of a paper bag, it is highly probable that her admirers would have been an entirely different class.It is the thing you are found doing while the horde looks on that you shall be loved for - or ignored. ~ Djuna Barnes

Elizabeth Taylor is pre-feminist woman. This is the source of her continuing greatness and relevance. She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary clich?. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm. The specter of the femme fatale stalks all men's relations with women. ~ Camille Paglia

This woman is Pocahontas. She is Athena and Hera. Lying in this messy, unmade bed, eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O'Hara. With ministrations of lipstick and eyeliner I give birth to Ophelia. To Marie Antoinette. Over the next trip of the larger hand around the face of the bedside clock, I give form to Lucrezia Borgia. Taking shape at my fingertips, my touches of foundation and blush, here is Jocasta. Lying here, Lady Windermere. Opening her eyes, Cleopatra. Given flesh, a smile, swinging her sculpted legs off one side of the bed, this is Helen of Troy. Yawning and stretching, here is every beautiful woman across history. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

In Ancient Greek literature male poets tend not simply to portray women as lecherous but to attribute to them a species of lust different from that of males: a subhuman and automatic reflex, an animalistic urge. Sappho is important because she gives a fulle human voice to female desire for the first time in Western history. Since she defiantly chooses the quintessential love-object Helen of Troy as her freethinking agent, she seems fully conscious of the revolutionary claim she is making. ~ Sappho

Move over, Helen of Troy; Jenny Trout is going to wage a war on good health and fit bodies! ~ Jennifer Armintrout

She was beautiful. In fact she was possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She was tall, with dark black hair, light skin, and big brown eyes. Her face was beautiful, not fake beautiful like a model or an actress, because she was obviously a real person, but rather Helen of Troy, launch-a-thousand-ships kind of good-looking. ~ Larry Correia

Coming as a kind of pleasure-package with her parents and sisters, as a girl Theodora performed acrobatic tricks and erotic dances in and around the hippodrome – part of the fringe of shows, spectacles and penny theatricals that accompanied the games. It was said by contemporary chroniclers that one of Theodora's most popular turns was a re-enactment of the story of Leda (the mother of Helen of Troy) and the Swan (Zeus in disguise). The Greek myth went that Zeus was so enraptured with Queen Leda when he espied her bathing by the banks of the River Eurotas that he turned himself into a swan so that he could ravish the Spartan Queen. Theodora, as Leda, would leave a trail of grain up on to (some said into) her body, which the 'swan' (in Constantinople in fact a goose) then eagerly consumed. The Empress's detractors delighted in memorialising the fact that Theodora's services were eagerly sought out for anal intercourse, as both an active and a passive partner. As a child and as an adolescent woman Theodora would have been considered dirt, but she was, physically, right at the heart of human affairs in a burgeoning city in interesting times.

Theodora was also, obviously, wildly attractive. Born in either Cyprus or Syria, as a teenager – already the mother of a young girl and with a history of abortions – she left Constantinople as the companion of a Syrian official, the governor of Libya Pentapolis. The two travelled to North Africa, where, after four years of maltre ~ Bettany Hughes

The boy's eyes went to him, and a shock passed through Magnus. They were not Will's eyes, the eyes Magnus remembered being as blue as a night sky in Hell, eyes Magnus has seen both despairing and tender.
This boy has shining golden eyes, like crystal glass filled brimful with crisp white wine and held up to catch the light of a blazing sun. If his skin was luminous, his eyes were radiant. Magnus could not imagine these eyes as tender. The boy was very, very lovely, but his was a beauty like that of Helen of Troy might have had once, disaster written in every line. The light of his beauty made Magnus think of cities burning. ~ Cassandra Clare

I think Helen of Troy must have been pretty hot. She got two countries going crazy for 10 years over her. ~ Colin Quinn

You have not been yourself all day," said Henry, and rose from his seat with face unmoved. Margaret rushed at him and seized both his hands. She was transfigured.
"Not any more of this!" she cried. "You shall see the connection if it kills you, Henry! You have had a mistress - I forgave you. My sister has a lover - you drive her from the house. Do you see the connection? Stupid, hypocritical, cruel - oh, contemptible! - a man who insults his wife when she's alive and cants with her memory when she's dead. A man who ruins a woman for his pleasure, and casts her off to ruin other men. And gives bad financial advice, and then says he is not responsible. These men are you. You can't recognise them, because you cannot connect. I've had enough of your unneeded kindness. I've spoilt you long enough. All your life you have been spoiled. Mrs. Wilcox spoiled you. No one has ever told what you are - muddled, criminally muddled. Men like you use repentance as a blind, so don't repent. Only say to yourself, 'What Helen has done, I've done. ~ E.M. Forster

The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear. ~ Helen H. Gardener

When summer gathers up her robes of glory, and like a dream of beauty glides away. ~ Sarah Helen Whitman

I've had more than one person tell me how courageous and strong I am, how brave and cutting-edge. I'm not any of those things. I'm just another person living my life and trying to make my way in the world, a person who has found out that love is complicated and life is difficult, but that companionship is worth all the king's ransom. ~ Helen Boyd

You're all Helen talks about. She's been reading Welsh history books and plaguing the family with accounts of Owain Glynd and something called the Eistedfodd." His eyes sparkled with friendly mockery. "Helen was hacking and spitting so much the other day that we thought she was coming down with a cold, until we realized she was practicing the Welsh alphabet."
Ordinarily Rhys would have made some sarcastic retort, but he'd barely noticed the gibe. His chest had gone tight with pleasure.
"She doesn't have to do that," he muttered.
"Helen wants to please you," Devon said. "It's her nature. Which leads to something I want to make clear: Helen is like a younger sister to me. And although I'm obviously the last man alive who should lecture anyone about propriety, I expect you to behave like an altar boy with her for the next few days."
Rhys gave him a surly glance. "I *was* an altar boy, and I can tell you that reports of their virtue are highly exaggerated. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Since neither of us needs sleep we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts. If anyone else on the bus notices anything about us they assume it's because they're drunk. I've ~ Helen Oyeyemi

It is important to value the individual, to have good health, a loving family and good relationships, to have community ties, leisure pursuits. These are all part of our lives. It is important to keep all of our parts in working order. ~ Helen Lynch

Ray kept well away from the shed. He hated the loony gestures of the furniture, its bossiness, the way Maxine would shape a table to enclose the sitter at it, trapping him like a baby in a high chair or a school boy at his inkwell. ~ Helen Garner

Who killed this man [Patrick Sonnier]?
Nobody.
Everybody can argue that he or she was just doing a job - the governor, the warden, the head of the Department of Corrections, the district attorney, the judge, the jury, the Pardon Board, the witnesses to the execution. Nobody feels personally responsible for the death of this man. (p. 101) ~ Helen Prejean

So beautiful. And here. She'd come to find him again. No one ever looked for him. They all knew he wanted to be alone. Except it wasn't always that way. Sometimes he was alone out of habit. Sometimes it took effort to distract himself from the growing emptiness inside. ~ Helen Hoang

A widow is a fascinating being with the flavor of maturity, the spice of experience, the piquancy of novelty, the tang of practiced coquetry, and the halo of one man's approval. ~ Helen Rowland

Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth. ~ Helen Caldicott

Helen savored the peace and quiet that only came in the complete absence of stupid questions. ~ Christopher Farnsworth

We would sift through every inch of what it was that worked, or if it didn't, and wonder what was effective in it, in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing. ~ Helen Frankenthaler

It was told that during the wedding feast, Eris [Discordia], a daughter of Nyx, threw a golden apple into their midst, intended as a prize for the most beautiful amongst the three Goddesses at the table: Athena, Hera & Aphrodite, the daughter, wife & clandestine lover of Zeus, respectively. And Zeus wisely dodged the responsibility of making such a tough decision,directing that it should be made by Paris of Troy instead. ~ Nicholas Chong

I had to admit, sometimes I sensed the strangeness of the world tugging at my sleeve, like a mischievous toddler, and I wanted to follow it. ~ Troy H. Gardner

I can remember the morning after President Nixon won re-election in 1972. His chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, called a Cabinet meeting and told the members: 'You are all a bunch of burned-out volcanoes;' and asked for their resignations. ~ Helen Thomas

Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. You must promise me not to live to be too old, William. It if is at all convenient, die before you're fifty. It my take a bit of doing. But I advise this is simply because there is no telling when another Helen Loomis might be born. It would be dreadful, wouldn't it, if you lived on to be very very old and some afternoon in 1999 walked down Main street and saw me standing there, aged twenty-one, and the whole thing out of balance again? ~ Ray Bradbury

When things are serious and either Amy Eleni or I need to beat our personal hysteric, the informal code is to seize your head and twist coils of your hair around your fingers and groan, "I'm not mad! I'm not mad! I don't want to die!" And if you have a friend who knows, then the friend grabs her head too and replies, "There's someone inside of me, and she says I must die!" That way it is stupid, and funny, and serious.

Our hysteric is the revelation that we refuse to be consoled for all this noise, for all this noise and for the attacks on our softnesses, the loss of sensitivity to my scalp with every batch of box braids. Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We're scared by the happy, hollow disciple that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer. We need to know what that biscuit-tin discipline is, where it comes from. We need to know whether it's a sign that our bones are turning against the rest of us, whether anyone will help us if our bones win out, or whether the people who should help us will say "You look wonderful!" instead. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

I will not fall for any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitment phobics, people with girlfriends or wives, misogynists, megalomanics, chauvists, emotional fuckwits or freeloaders, perverts. ~ Helen Fielding

The Town Clerkship, however, was the means of giving me a lesson in electoral methods. ~ Catherine Helen Spence

It was once a house of God, but not after that terrible night. It changed; they let that woman in and it changed their lives for ever. ~ Helen Phifer

Antiheroes
Aren't just black and white; they exploit the mystery and allure of shadow, of shades of grey. For the writer, they offer more story possibilities than heroes. They could tip either way, either supporting or fighting him. Reformed antiheroes could revert to bad ways, and even on the side of good, but they cab still use methods that would make a true hero blush or flinch. The only problem is that the characteristics that make them antiheroes can, if use for good, transform them into heroes; and then life tends to be much less entertaining. ~ Helen McCarthy

When would I learn the secret of happy, contented teamwork? Why did I always want to be the last link? If I would love the Lord with all my mind, I had to give Him all that I thought I knew or could do, and be willing for Him to place me anywhere within the team to do any job He chose for me. Only then would I exprience true peace of mind. ~ Helen Roseveare

I still dream about being on the space station with the feeling of being weightless. The weightlessness is the most amazing, relaxing and natural feeling. ~ Helen Sharman

I try to be passionate about every aspect of my life, how I love my wife, how I serve my wife, how I serve God. In the same way, I try to be passionate about football. I try to serve my coaches with passion. I try to serve my teammates with passion. I try to serve God, through football, with passion. ~ Troy Polamalu

Constantine: "Bullocks. Anyone'll do anything."
Chas: "What? Come on, John, everyone's got a line they reach!"
Constantine: "Helen used to be the wildest woman I ever knew, Chas. A night out with her and you knew the reason we're all here, you knew what we could all be if we made the effort..She never drank or took anything and I knew she'd never need to and now look at the bleedin' state of her. No one has a line and no one has a soddin' moral code either, not outside a John Wayne movie ~ Garth Ennis

Sojourner [Truth]'s life exemplifies the process that occurs within ourselves as we grow to understand that we hold the authority to shape our own lives. This inner authority came when she embraced all of herself, which enabled her to speak from an authentic voice. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt

Disturbs me that there's a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn't mine because I'm a wife. This part isn't really me at all, but a promise I made on a snowy day. A promise to stay and to be with Arturo and to be good to him, and when there's no other way, I have to go to that promise to find my feeling for my husband. We walk the finest of foolish, foolish lines. How can Webster still love Ted? How can anybody love anybody else for more than five minutes? ~ Helen Oyeyemi

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,
not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break. ~ Helen Hunt Jackson

The experiences of the heartless are so limited. It is hate that is blind. Love may miss a flaw here and there, but hate misses beauty everywhere. ~ Helen McCloy

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles ... ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Love. I'm not capable of it, can't even approach it from the side, let alone head-on. Nor am I alone in this - everyone is like this, the liars. Singing songs and painting pictures and telling each other stories about love and its mysteries and marvelous properties, myths to keep morale up - maybe one day it'll materialize. But I can say it ten times a day, a hundred times, 'I love you,' to anyone and anything, to a woman, to a pair of pruning shears. I've said it without meaning it at all, taken love's name in vain and gone dismally unpunished. Love will never be real, or if it is, it has no power. No power. There's only covetousness, and if what we covet can't be won with gentle words - and often it can't - then there is force. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn't feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this - it didn't matter. I don't have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait. ~ Helen Oyeyemi