Medusa Quotes

How have I projected the Medusa outside of me? ~ Massimilla Harris

You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soul - you wish to know if it is reflected in my face. ~ Theda Bara

I cannot help remembering a remark of De Casseres. It was over the wine in Mouquin's. Said he: The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie ~ Jack London

The lightning cracked again, this time like it was right on top of us, feet away from arcing through the house, and her skin was white as stone and her hair waving, and I thought about the Medusa I'd seen in an old movie when I was younger, monstrous and green-scaled, and I thought: That's not it at all. She was beautiful as Mama. That's how she froze those men, with the shock of seeing something so perfect and fierce in the world. ~ Jesmyn Ward

Medusa was fascinating to work with because I gave her a snake's body so that she could pull herself with her hands which gave her a very creepy aura. I didn't want to animate cosmic gowns. Most Medusas you see in the classics have flowing robes which would be mad to even try to animate. ~ Ray Harryhausen

He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa. They were the face of nature herself, the obscene goddess revealed naked. This life form thing was breathtakingly beautiful. As he stared at it, he found himself being pulled out of the human world into a world where moral boundaries blur and finally dissolve completely. He was lost in wonder and admiration, even though he knew that he was the prey. (149) ~ Richard Preston

Tessa Kelly is a man-eater. She's like Medusa, but without the whole "freezing to stone" bit. Because that's not her style. That's not painful enough for her. She'd much rather draw you in with her blinding beauty, and then rip your heart out and eat it in front of you. And then she'll stand over you and watch you slowly die at her feet. ~ J. Daniels

You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing. ~ Helene Cixous

Gravity's Rainbow"

Come on with me through ruined liplock
Across Tangian deserts we'll flock
Madcap Medusa flank my foghorn
We'll change four seasons with our first born.

All ships of sense on hyper ocean
All kinds of chaos still in motion
My culture vulture such a dab hand
I'll steal you from the year 4000

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Your tears leave trails of Tick fall blur room
Autonoma the room is bloom groom
Those crippled lines that I can't get to
You'd slip through time but I won't let you

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love< ~ The Klaxons

Biological death is only a mechanical problem, it can be solved and man can live millions of years! Do not believe in life after death! Seek for the life within the life! The medusa of Turritopsis nutricula is biologically immortal and this little creature is a big inspiration for us! He who thinks positively reaches his target! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

You have more baggage than United Airlines. Cross that out. You have more issues than Medusa, and that woman makes the inside of a cat lady's thoughts seem like a calming place. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

One of the talents of the [late] great Steve Jobs is that he [knew] how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have has a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason. (p.98) ~ Seth Godin

Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. ~ Joseph Campbell

I am interested in you, Gretchen." When I still won't look at him, he presses his fingers against my jaw and gently turns my face. He is looking straight in my eyes when he says, "I'm interested in you."
His midnight blues burn with an intensity that almost makes me believe him. Makes me want to believe him. He knows just the right thing to say to mess with my mind. He always has. He leans closer, watching me. His lips are a breath away from mine.
This time I'm not buying it.
My knee connects with his soft spot and he doubles over, gasping for air.
"Find your own way home," I snap before turning and marching back to my car. ~ Tera Lynn Childs

Come with me, the river said, close your eyes and quiet your limbs and float with me into the wonder and mystery of the canyons, see the unknown and the little known, look upon the stone gods face to face, see Medusa, drink my waters, hear my song, feel my power, come along and drift with me toward the distant, ultimate and legendary sea ... ~ Edward Abbey

Oh. Now you are not so afraid, then?"
Kitty opened her mouth, indignant. "I was not afraid before! I was... shocked. How many times do you see your orphanage roommate be able to turn someone into stone?"
"Every time I look in the mirror. ~ Ana Franco

Raft of the Medusa. ~ John-Allen Price

Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting ~ Ray Bradbury

When Medusa looks in the mirror, she sees the Lady of Sorrows. ~ Mason Cooley

In mythology, the Medusa can petrify people with a look - which is a good thing, I think. But the Medusa is a unique symbol - something strong. It's about going all the way. ~ Donatella Versace

It can't be," Udecht stammered. "Eadran the Vanquisher destroyed him near a millennium ago. Maelgrum is gone. Finished."
"My dear bishop, he isn't exactly alive, I grant you," the hooded medusa teased. "But he is certainly a lot less dead than you would like. ~ T.O. Munro

Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa's head which turned these terrors to stone. ~ R.D. Laing

Turn around, and keep your eyes closed shut, For if the Gorgon, Medusa, does appear, and you see her, You would never be able to return upward. ~ Dante Alighieri

I was careful to take my next breath through my mouth. I didn't want Quinn-sniff to influence my already wino-impaired brain function. A little voice in the back of my head said, Don't trust him! You're not special! You're weird and awkward and a bigheaded Neanderthal freak with Medusa hair! He's confused you with someone else! ~ Penny Reid

I don't even remember killing Medusa. ~ Rick Riordan

If the delicate flower liked to play Medusa, maybe Karina could take on the role of Perseus. It was really for the good of all womankind that she slay the gorgon. ~ Lexi Blake

I'm fairly certain, Captain," she said, "that the more you discover about me, the more you will dislike me. Therefore, let's cut to the chase and acknowledge that we don't like each other. Then we won't have to bother with the in-between part."
She was so bloody frank and practical about the whole thing that Christopher couldn't help but be amused.
"I'm afraid I can't oblige you."
"Why not?"
"Because when you said that just now, I found myself starting to like you."
"You'll recover," she said.
Her decisive tone made him want to smile. "It's getting worse, actually," he told her. "Now I'm absolutely convinced that I like you."
Beatrix gave him a patently skeptical stare. "What about my hedgehog? Do you like her, too?"
Christopher considered that. "Affection for rodents can't be rushed."
"Medusa isn't a rodent. She's an erinaceid. ~ Lisa Kleypas

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, ~ Robert Masello

I've been prepping for my role as Medusa. ~ Joaquin Phoenix

Similarly, Medusa (or Gorgon) was celebrated for her outstanding beauty. She was a daughter of the very wealthy king Phorcys whose large kingdom was surrounded by the sea. This Medusa, according to the ancient stories, was of such striking beauty that not only did she surpass all other women--which was an amazing and supernatural thing--but she also attracted to herself, because of her pleasing appearance--her long and curly blond hair spun like gold, along with her beautiful face and body--every mortal creature upon whom she looked, so that she seemed to make people immovable. For this reason the fable claimed that they had turned to stone. ~ Christine De Pizan

Look, ladies, we've been over this. I don't even remember killing Medusa. I don't remember anything! Can't we just call a truce and talk about your weekly specials?" Stheno gave her sister a pouty look, which was hard to do with giant bronze tusks. "Can we? ~ Rick Riordan

They call you Medusa. One wrong look and your brain turns to stone. ~ Alexandra Bracken

If a woman shows too often the Medusa's head, she must not be astonished if her lover is turned into stone. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Let me explain: there are dragons, and then there are drakons.
Drakons are several millennia older than dragons, andmuch larger. They look like giant serpents. Most don't have wings. Most don't breathe fire (though some do). All are poisonous. All are immensely strong, with scales harder than titanium. Their eyes can paralyze you; not the turn-you~to-stone Medusa-type paralysis, buttheoh~my~gods-that~big~snake~is~going~to~eat~me type of paralysis, which is just as bad. ~ Rick Riordan

The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers. ~ John Updike

Where lies Prince Hetwith?" Kimbolt still evaded Dema's question.
The medusa thought a moment and then waved a hand towards the gorge. "Mostly over there, though I think you are standing on one of his legs. ~ T.O. Munro

Fascinated by the glitter of gain, man gazes at the Medusa-like face of greed and stands petrified. ~ Manly P. Hall

The sight of the Medusa head made the boar squeal in outrage. Maybe it looked too much like one of his relatives. ~ Rick Riordan

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. ("The Medusa") ~ Thomas Ligotti

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. ("The Medusa") ~ Thomas Ligotti

Imagine this:
Instead of waiting in her tower, Rapunzel slices off her long, golden hair with a carving knife, and then uses it to climb down to freedom.
Just as she's about to take the poison apple, Snow White sees the familiar wicked glow in the old lady's eyes, and slashes the evil queen's throat with a pair of sewing scissors.
Cinderella refuses everything but the glass slippers from her fairy godmother, crushes her stepmother's windpipe under her heel, and the Prince falls madly in love with the mysterious girl who dons rags and blood-stained slippers.

Imagine this:
Persephone goes adventuring with weapons hidden under her dress.
Persephone climbs into the gaping chasm.
Or, Persephone uses her hands to carve a hole down to hell.
In none of these versions is Persephone's body violated unless she asks Hades to hold her down with his horse-whips.
Not once does she hold out on eating the pomegranate, instead biting into it eagerly and relishing the juice running down her chin, staining it red.
In some of the stories, Hades never appears and Persephone rules the underworld with a crown of her own making.
In all of them, it is widely known that the name Persephone means Bringer of Destruction.

Imagine this:
Red Riding Hood marches from her grandmother's house with a bloody wolf pelt.
Medusa rights the wrongs that have been done to her.
Eurydice breaks every muscle in her arms climbi ~ Theappleppielifestyle

If you love me, you will go now. I would have you live. For once they wake, I cannot stop them... ~ Sasha Summers

You're going native! Now, put down that ridiculous tray and help me kill this demigod. Or have you forgotten that he's the one who vaporized Medusa?" Percy ~ Rick Riordan

Once upon a time there was a wicked witch and her name was
Lilith
Eve
Hagar
Jezebel
Delilah
Pandora
Jahi
Tamar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called goddess and her name was
Kali
Fatima
Artemis
Hera
Isis
Mary
Ishtar
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called queen and her name was
Bathsheba
Vashti
Cleopatra
Helen
Salome
Elizabeth
Clytemnestra
Medea
and there was a wicked witch and she was also called witch and her name was
Joan
Circe
Morgan le Fay
Tiamat
Maria Leonza
Medusa
and they had this in common: that they were feared, hated, desired, and worshiped. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Tom just stood there, sword in hand, a huge grin on his lips. He stared at Medusa and Medusa stared at him, and in this moment that made his dreams come true, Tom could only think of one thing to say.

"How's it going? ~ S.J. Kincaid

Athena's jealousy made a monster of fair Medusa.
I often wonder what beauty my own demons have destroyed. ~ Nichole McElhaney

the American essayist Lewis Thomas on the semicolon: The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added [ . . .] The period [or full stop] tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with the semicolon there you get a pleasant feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer. The Medusa and the Snail, 1979 ~ Lynne Truss

Stand your ground!" Stheno yelled. "I've got free samples! ~ Rick Riordan

If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy, but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand. ~ Anthony Marra

We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. ~ Helene Cixous

You're probably wondering: why were Medusa's kids a golden warrior and a winged horse? And how had they been stuck in Medusa's body all those years?Heck, I dunno. I'm just telling you how it was. You want stuff to make sense, you're in the wrong universe ~ Rick Riordan

If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive.

We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists - the neoreactionaries - think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Witho ~ Reza Negarestani

The look she gave him in reply would have petrified Medusa. ~ Karsten Knight

Yes, I'm a hypocrite. It doesn't change anything. ~ S.J. Kincaid

Algol is the name of the winking demon star, Medusa of the skies; fair but deadly to look on, even for one who is already dying.
Ah, the bright stars of the night.
Almost they obliterate the clear white pain. A thousand stars shining in the ether; but no dazzling newcomer. And so little time left, so little time ...
Yet still two-faced Medusa laughs from behind the clouds, demanding homage. Homage, Medusa, or a sword, a blade sharper than death itself.
The wind stirs. Night clouds obscure the universe. A lower music now, a different kind of death.
No stars tonight, my love.
No Selene. ~ Elizabeth Redfern

But life, they said, means life. Dying inside.
The Devil was evil, mad, but I was the Devil's wife
which made me worse. I howled in my cell.
If the Devil is gone then how could this be hell? ~ Carol Ann Duffy

There is at least one species of jellyfish that can grow younger, which is something that pretty much no creature on Earth can do. Don't believe me? Look it up. Turritopsis dohrinii. The immortal jellyfish.
When it's threatened, Turritopsis dohrinii can return from its adult medusa stage, the stage where a jellyfish looks like a jellyfish, all the way back into a younger stage, where it clings to the bottom of the ocean floor for safety. Theoretically, it can do this indefinitely: grow old, then young, old, then young, and never really die.
It would be as if, when everything started going wrong, when it started getting stressful, we could have just gone backward. Imagine that. Imagine if we could have said, "Oops, this is too hard," and shrunk in size, returned to a place of being just kids, the way we always had been.
And we could just stay there, tethered safely, forever. ~ Ali Benjamin

Truth, an objective thing, is usually conceived of as something simple. Quite the opposite is correct: truth is enormously complicated; it calls for effort on several levels to arrive at its definition; it demands the utmost devotion in its service.
Do you doubt it? Then resolve evermore to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. You must hurt your friends, suffer the most pitiless scrutiny and persecution, turn the festive occasion into a nightmare of share words and recriminations. You will be called "a sour-puss," a curmudgeon, a difficult man, and very possibly a knave and an untruthful braggart.
The world, as it is organized, is a conspiracy against truth. Individuals, communities, nations, they are all afraid of the truth as if it were a medusa head which froze men to stone, even as it froze them to virtue. ~ Francis Beauchesne Thornton