Ovid Quotes

“Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’…Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“The cause is hidden. The effect is visible to all.”
― Ovid

“Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.”
― Paul Christensen, The Heretic Emperor

“And besides, we lovers fear everything”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“All right, boy, skewer me. I've dropped my defenses,
I'm an easy victim. Why, by now
Your arrows practically know their own way to the target
And feel less at home in their quiver than in me.”
― Ovid, The Erotic Poems

“The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.”
― Ovid

“My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope.”
― Ovid

“Nothing retains its original form, but Nature, the goddess of all renewal, keeps altering one shape into another. Nothing at all in the world can perish, you have to believe me; things merely vary and change their appearance. What we call birth
is merely becoming a different entity; what we call death is ceasing to be the same. Though the parts may possibly shift
their position from here to there, the wholeness in nature is constant.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-imbroider'd vale
Where the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?”
― John Milton, The Complete Poems

“Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor”
― Ovid

“What did Sappho of Lesbos teach but how to love women?”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey, at length evening comes with its sacred song.”
― Brian Friel, Translations

“I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.

I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another.

One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“Ceza kaldırılabilir; ama suç insanın içinde sonsuza kadar yaşar.”
― Ovidius, Metamorphoses

“My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind! In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting.
Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream
by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Philemon counselled with old Baucis first;
and then discovered to the listening Gods
their hearts' desire, ‘We pray you let us have
the care of your new temple; and since we
have passed so many years in harmony,
let us depart this life together— Let
the same hour take us both—I would not see
the tomb of my dear wife; and let me not
be destined to be buried by her hands!’
At once their wishes were fulfilled. So long
as life was granted they were known to be
the temple's trusted keepers, and when age
had enervated them with many years,
as they were standing, by some chance, before
the sacred steps, and were relating all
these things as they had happened, Baucis saw
Philemon, her old husband, and he, too,
saw Baucis, as their bodies put forth leaves;
and while the tops of trees grew over them,
above their faces, — they spoke each to each;
as long as they could speak they said, ‘Farewell,
farewell, my own’—and while they said farewell;
new leaves and branches covered both at once.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Oh, Narcissus! My heart beats ink for you.
A pulse in every line.
It's your eyes
my words want to be read by,
your kind of mind
they would be understood by,
your heart
they'd be felt by,
and then you'd feel the same way that I do,
if only these words could be read or heard by you.”
― Steven L. Sheppard, The Untold Story Of Narcissus And Echo

“Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“Oh, is that right? You know, a lioness will protect her cub by baring her teeth, by roaring, using her claws to defend her cub if she feels she has to - this mother, has other means. You are standing in the way of my daughter's best interests. If you try to pick our peach from our family tree, you will be picking a fight. Do you understand me?”
― Steven L. Sheppard, The Untold Story Of Pyramus And Thisbe

“O, lente, lente currite noctis equi!”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“May the world near and far dread the sons of Aeneas, and if there be land that feared not Rome, may it love Rome instead.”
― Ovid

“He's at war with himself. Why doesn't he surrender to his feelings and stop fighting himself? He has hang-ups that I must cut him loose from.”
― Steven L. Sheppard, Byblis And Caunus

“You really are exotic, for boys in my country, they do not have such pectorals. I like yours.”
― Steven L. Sheppard, The Untold Story Of Iphis And Ianthe

“Follow your heart, not the law.”
― Steven L. Sheppard, Byblis And Caunus

“Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis”
― Ovid

“I think I know what he is REALLY doing in there... and thinking about ME while doing it." (continuing) "But when he thinks of me, he thinks: sister! Think: Byblis! BYBLIS! I don't think of him as my brother, I think of him as CAUNUS!”
― Steven L. Sheppard, Byblis And Caunus

“Look past our kinship, and towards a romantic relationship!”
― Steven L. Sheppard, Byblis And Caunus

“Aelia, please stop worrying. You look beautiful. We've had large parties before and you haven't been nervous." There was the clink of cosmetic pots and bottles of nard used to perfume the forehead.
"I wasn't nervous until you mentioned Ovid would be coming," Aelia said.
Aelia was not alone in her love of Ovid's poetry. Passia had read every word the man had ever written. He was considered to be one of Rome's experts on both love and beauty, and most women I knew owned several of his books. When Passia heard he would be in attendance I thought she might swoon.
There was the ruffle of a scroll being unraveled. "Could this be one of the sources of your concern?Women's Facial Cosmetics?"
I remembered the book. Apicius had bought it and other Ovid titles for Aelia two years earlier as a Saturnalia gift.
"I know, I shouldn't worry. But if he didn't know so much, how could he write it down? It is as though he were the mouthpiece for Venus herself!”
― Crystal King, Feast of Sorrow

“I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.

I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another.

One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“Innocence is no earthly weapon.”
― Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992