Isolde Quotes & Sayings

This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part and this girl is pale and stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don't quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterises her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to be somebody else. — Eleanor Catton

His words hit me. He knew about Mila's and Gabriel's love ... perhaps he could change things. If he did, Eli and I could be together freely, but until then there was no happy ending. I could feel it. The love that Eli and I have was great, but when has any great love in history ended well? Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, or Tristan and Isolde? Each and every one ended in tragedy, be it death or banishment. — Skyla Madi

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni. — W. H. Auden

They both laughed and drank to each other; they had never tasted sweeter liquor in all their lives. And in that moment they fell so deeply in love that their hearts would never be divided. So the destiny of Tristram and Isolde was ordained. — Thomas Malory

By this Yoshida explains that 'when we look at the actual conditions of this world through the camera's lens, we must deny the random movements of the human eye and restrain the eye's constant movements in order to focus on one point. — Isolde Standish

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves. The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni. — W. H. Auden

It should never have been this way. My comrades turning on me, my enemies saving me. But worst of all, I should never have felt anything other than hatred for this man, the king, Definitely not this, this warmth that thaws my soul.
I stare into the king's eyes. I am Isolde, I am Juliet, I am Guinevere.
I am every one of those idiots because I've fallen for the king. — Laura Thalassa

Why should I ignore them? In my own house? Spiteful snobs! I've appalling taste, do I? I'm skeletal, am I? Anyone would look skeletal next to them. They are both starting to look like porkers! As soon as I go down, I'm going to mention it. I'm going to particularly point out Isolde's thunder thighs. I suppose it's appalling good taste to display them in such tight jeans. I'm going to ask how she even got into those pants without splitting the seams. — Sonal Panse

Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the Greeks; for they, even while they worshipped her, knew that she was "laughter-loving." The mass of the people are perfectly right in their conviction that Venus is a partly comic spirit. We are under no obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throbbing, world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead. — C.S. Lewis

We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time," says Isolde. "You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can't really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no. — Eleanor Catton

Look at me!' I screeched. 'Look at me, Amadeus von Linden, you sadistic hypocrite, and watch this time! You're not questioning me now, this isn't your work, I'm not an enemy agent spewing wireless code! I'm just a minging Scots slag screaming insults at your daughter! So enjoy yourself and watch! Think of Isolde! Think of Isolde and watch! — Elizabeth Wein

When my friend Melot set the trap, I think I knew it. I turned to death full face, as I had turned to love with my whole body. I would let death enter me as you had entered me. You had crept along my blood vessels through the wound, and the blood that circulates returns to the heart. You circulated me, you made me blush like a girl in the hoop of your hands. You were in my arteries and my lymph, you were the colour just under my skin, and if I cut myself, it was you I bled. Red Isolde, alive on my fingers, and always the force of blood pushing you back to my heart. — Jeanette Winterson

Until tomorrow, Fair Isolde. — Rachel Hawkins

You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, 'Tristan.'
I answered you: 'Isolde.'
Isolde. The world became a word. — Jeanette Winterson

Can you get me home by nine?" His grin widened. "Isolde, my friend, I can get you back by quarter 'til. — Rachel Hawkins

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us. — Adrienne Rich

And there are no words left, try as men may, to describe that little death, that incandescent instant when, transacted with mutual love, there is no difference between sweet submission and exquisite conquest. — Isolde Martyn

Isolde took a swig. "It doesn't matter if you believe it or not. Your government just gave you two months to get knocked up." She held up the bottle, her face dull and red. "Cheers."
"You better get your fill of the booze now, then," said Xochi. "You'll be drinking for two pretty soon. — Dan Wells

Fortune's a fickle wench. She can knee you in the groin at any time. — Isolde Martyn

Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honour is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. — W. Somerset Maugham

The discrepancy between the vacationists' good times and Isolde's unfortunate experience is more than disgusting — Paul Hindemith

Nothing in this place is sexy," I told him, and he[Dex] laughed.
"Oh, come on, Izzy. Even you, Miss Anti-Romance, can admit there's something just a little bit appealing about making out in a candlelit cave."
"Bats live in caves," I reminded him. "And where there are bats, There's bat poop. Lot's of it. Did you know there's a cave in Mexico where they have a whole mountain made out guano? — Rachel Hawkins

We needed to get back to the times of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy or Tristan and Isolde. Where you felt that life altering, ground breaking, universe shifting true love. — Emily McKee

If you can't know the truth, said Isolde, live the most awesome lie you can think off. — Dan Wells

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year. — Robertson Davies

I tried to give her my best "I Am A Demon Princess" look, which was quite the challenge, seeing as how my hair was hanging in my face and my nose was running. "What's your name?" I asked.
The girl kept her eyes on me, but her hands were moving restlessly over the ground around her, no doubt searching for the knife. "Izzy," she said.
I raised both my eyebrows. Not exactly a name to strike fear into the heart.
Izzy must've read that in my expression, because she frowned. "I'm Isolde Brannick, daughter of Aislinn, daughter of Fiona, daughter of-"
"Right, right, daughter of a bunch of fierce ladies, got it. — Rachel Hawkins

That's it. Be yourself. Be Isolde Brannick, and they will have no choice but to adore you, He reached out and took my hand, pressing a kiss to the back of it. I was too stunned to do anything but sit there, my hand limp in his. — Rachel Hawkins

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer - the romantic - asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening') it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal,' that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. — Adrienne Rich

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel. — Eduard Hanslick