Quotes & Sayings About Odyssey
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Top Odyssey Quotes
The title is Ulysses'
'Is it about the Odyssey?'
'No, it's about how prosaic life is today.'
'And so?'
'That's all. It says that our heads are full of nonsense. That we are flesh, blood, and bone. That one person has the same value as another. That we want only to eat, drink, fuck. — Elena Ferrante
Cultivating self-love is an odyssey with moments of difficulty and joy. It's an excursion into knowing ourselves, learning to accept and deal with what we discover... and struggling with our fear of allowing in a little madness to set us free. — Bud Harris
At the opening of the Odyssey, Telemachus, inspired by the male-born Athena, searches for his father by turning against his mother. Jesus too publicly spurns his mother to be about his father's business. Male adulthood begins with the breaking of female chains.? — Camille Paglia
Well, sometimes everybody tells you something because it is true."
"Sometimes," Nina clarified, "everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid? — Amor Towles
I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides. — William Golding
That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference. — Tom Bodett
The odyssey is not going out and seeing the world: it's about trying to get home. It's home to the woman you love. — Pete Hamill
And when long years and seasons wheeling brought around that point of time ordained for him to make his passage homeward, trials and dangers, even so, attended him even in Ithaca, near those he loved. — Homer
It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics. — Jorge Luis Borges
We are on a difficult course, on a new Odyssey for Greece, but we know the road to Ithaca and have charted the waters. — George Papandreou
The earliest complete Odyssey to have survived is from the late tenth century, now in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library in Florence, — Adam Nicolson
I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.' Homer, The Odyssey — Andy Miller
The ancient world is always accessible, no matter what culture you come from. I remember when I was growing up in India and I read the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey.' — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story. — George Saintsbury
My parents wanted to name me Karim Hill. My aunt always liked the name Dule, from this actor Keir Dullea, who was in '2001: Space Odyssey.' That's how I got the name Karim Dule Hill. Growing up, I never liked the name Karim because people would ask me, 'Could you dunk like Kareem Abdul Jabbar?' — Dule Hill
Ulysses finds himself unchanged, aside from his experience, at the end of his odyssey. — Raymond Queneau
The right sort of gossip is a charming and stimulating thing. The Odyssey itself is simply glorious gossip, and the same may be said of nearly every tale of mingled fact and legend which has been handed down to us through the ages. — J. E. Buckrose
I would like to apologize to the relatives of the fan who gave me 29 books to sign in Odyssey 7, Manchester. I'm a little twitchy towards the end of a day of signing and did not mean to kill and eat him. — Terry Pratchett
Danny is on my bed and depressed because Ricky was picked up by a break dancer at the Odyssey on the night of the Duran Duran look-alike contest and murdered. — Bret Easton Ellis
In a time of disorder [Laertes] has returned to the care of the earth, the foundation of life and hope. And Odysseus finds him in an act emblematic of the best and most responsible kind of agriculture: an old man caring for a young tree. (pg. 123, The Body and the Earth) — Wendell Berry
And so my Odyssey begins... — Vardan Partamyan
'The Odyssey' is the great tale, and I was really taken by 'The Iliad,' so I dig into those things, and when I was a kid I didn't. You've gotta have a certain level of understanding yourself before that stuff really starts to resonate. — Karl Marlantes
A lot of cinematic influences on 'Descender' - Kubrick for sure. '2001: A Space Odyssey' is my favorite movie. It has been since I was 12. I just love that film. — Jeff Lemire
Though there are exceptions, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism tend to stress desirable states of consciousness, escaping the fretful, self-aware state of mind that so often makes everyday living a burden. For mystics from the Abrahamic faiths, however, the inward odyssey is also an upward odyssey, a quest for personal and vital communion with an infinite Being. — David C. Downing
To me, the fact that the Mexican came North in search of a better life is a tremendous epic that hasn't been written. It's an odyssey that we know nothing about. And they came with a dream for a better life. — Rudolfo Anaya
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey. — Raymond Queneau
The voyage of a lifetime starts at the windowsill. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Fucking hell, Woods!' squealed Decker. 'You really are retarded!' Or he squealed something similar. I was no longer listening. He now held the book aloft and was waving it around like the monkey with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. — Gavin Extence
I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere ... set out to find ... this home that I'd left a while back and couldn't remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn't really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be, and so, I'm on my way home, you know? — Bob Dylan
English poetic education should, really, not begin with The Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with Song of Amergin. — Robert Graves
The Aryans also composed two of the world's greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible - all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The — Arthur Herman
In the future, search engines should be as useful as HAL in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey-but hopefully they won't kill people. — Sergey Brin
It's been an incredible odyssey to make the journey from a vibrantly healthy person to someone with a chronic illness. — Karen Duffy
And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more. — Homer
They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possible of the reflected glory in the great eyes of Odysseus — Franz Kafka
Where we sail and anchor our heart fill up the multitude odyssey paving to the coming home of our soul. — Angelica Hopes
My odyssey to become an astronaut kind of started in grad school, and I was working, up at MIT, in space robotics-related work; human and robot working together. — Michael J. Massimino
Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling. — Simon Toyne
The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. — J.G. Ballard
Lack of luxury is not a reason to push others to poverty. ~ Michael A. van Doorn, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul — Angelica Hopes
Well, I guess [2001: A Space Odyssey] legitimized [science fiction], particularly for people who looked down on science fiction; you know, the intelligentsia. My definition of the intelligentsia: someone who's educated beyond their intelligence. — Arthur C. Clarke
But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.'
I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ 'No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive - than rule down here over all the breathless dead. — Homer
... though queens are a particular obsession of mine. I'm not speaking of European sovereigns, mind you, but that most glorious force of the chessboard. Did you know her square was originally occupied by a male "vizier," able to advance only one meager diagonal step per move? But during the reign of the great female monarchs, this piece metamorphosed into a "queen," and her power grew commensurate with her title. Only then did the game become something more - A mental odyssey that helped reshape the world. — Brian K. Vaughan
Question me now about all other matters, but do not ask who I am, for fear you may increase in my heart it's burden of sorrow as I think back; I am very full of grief, and I should not sit in the house of somebody else with my lamentation and wailing. It is not good to go on mourning forever. — Homer
'Interstellar' may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular. — Richard Corliss
Man may not be the colossus some secular spirits would have him be, armed with the strength and wisdom of the gods, but he has partaken of ambrosia. He has squinted trough the veil and seen just enough of divinity to measure himself by it. The Humanist knows both the strengths and the frailties of man. He strives. But he knows the bounds of his striving.......
Visions and ideals need a path, a way, a roadmap people can use as to arrive at those better, more permanent things that the wise are always seeing dimly whenever they strained their eyes. So man turned a mirror on himself, looked soberly, and-one day-began to write accounts of the discoveries made on the grandest odyssey of them all: the journey to the core of the human mind and soul. The grateful among us read them. — Tracy Lee Simmons
In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat. — Jami Attenberg
Sometimes," Nina clarified, "everybody tells you something because they are everybody. But why should one listen to everybody? Did everybody write the Odyssey? Did everybody write the Aeneid?" She — Amor Towles
He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. How did one annoy a two- kilometre-long black rectangular slab? And just what form would its disapproval take — Arthur C. Clarke
You cruel, hard-hearted gods!" I flung the goblet in his direction. Hermes barely had time to dart out of its way before it hit the wall and shattered to small pieces. "You're all the same! Hsst! Jealous! Vindictive! That's what you are! You allow yourselves to take pleasure with any mortal you wish. Let a goddess do the same. Let a goddess choose a mortal for her lover, and you set off in a fury of revenge against her as if her actions are an affront to you. And all the while, you male gods allow yourselves all kinds of liberties you deny to us females. — Tamara Agha-Jaffar
With McClure's support, Steffens embarked on an odyssey. For the better part of three years, he called on people in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and Madison. "My business is to find subjects and writers, to educate myself in the way the world is wagging, so as to bring the magazine up to date," he explained to his father. "I feel ready to do something really fine. — Doris Kearns Goodwin
As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or not watch the film. — Michael Mann
Upon my word, just see how mortal men always put the blame on us gods! We are the source of evil, so they say - when they have only their own madness to think if their miseries are worse than they ought to be. — Homer
Loan sharking may mean investment and immediate solutions but desperate loan sharks, who are short of cash, abuse your rights and attack other people's home. ~ Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul — Angelica Hopes
Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. — Malcolm Gladwell
Mistress; please: are you divine, or mortal? — Homer
Deep rooted envy is the main cause why people put you down, blame, shame, misjudge, maltreat and malign you; abusing your goodness and generosity. from the book, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul — Angelica Hopes
It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey. — Raymond Queneau
I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I'd seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one's eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. 'This may be my last moon,' I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey. — Roman Payne
Odyssey Dawn? That's not a military operation. That's a Carnival Cruise ship. — Stephen Colbert
Down the dank mouldering paths and past the Ocean's streams they went
and past the White Rock and the Sun's Western Gates and past
the Land of Dreams, and soon they reached the fields of asphodel
where the dead, the burnt-out wraiths of mortals make their home — Homer
It seems so odd to me, an odyssey
How honesty is honestly the rarest thing upon us
Its astonishing. — Asher Roth
Sharona Muir has written a gripping personal memoir about her odyssey to rediscover and reclaim her father. Along the way she uncovers some hard truths about the heroic founders of Israel and the Beginnings of Israeli science. The Book of Telling keeps in all the fears and resentments and consolations and warmth of such a process-at once her own story and the tale of a nation. — Edmund White
No ancient story, not even Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, has remained as popular through the course of time. The story of Rama appears as old as civilization and has a fresh appeal for every generation. — David Frawley
Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey. — Raymond Queneau
Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, "To Build a Fire," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Wit of Porportuk." He was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness. McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent just a single winter in the North and that he'd died by his own hand on his California estate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining a sedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused in print. — Jon Krakauer
Writing to me is a voyage, an odyssey, a discovery, because I'm never certain of precisely what I will find. — Gabriel Fielding
I think "Avatar" is kind of a unique category where people are enjoying the unique theatrical experience even though they may have seen it on the small screen. They want to have that immersive, transportive experience. "2001: A Space Odyssey" played for three years at the Loews cinema in Toronto. I remember that. It just kept playing. People wanted to return to that experience. That may not be the best example because I think "2001" took 25 years to break even. — James Cameron
Do not expect your life to "return to normal." That's not what you had in mind when you embarked on this odyssey. — Rasha
Goddess of song, teach me the story
of a hero. — Homer
My anger mounted. "What about your son and me? What about us? How can you even think of leaving me alone here with our baby boy? Telemachus needs his father. What's going to happen to us if you leave? Who will help me raise him? Who will take care of us? You know as well as I do some of the men around here are nothing but a bunch of scoundrels. Mark my words, Odysseus. The second you're gone, they'll swarm in here like bees around honey. They'll take over the place. I won't be able to do a thing to stop them. — Tamara Agha-Jaffar
Lily white's petals are at my feet anticipating the moment in which adventure and odyssey meet. — Delano Johnson
Men who neglect philosophy while busying themselves with ordinary affairs are like the Suitors [in the Odyssey] who desired Penelope but went to bed with her maids. — Gorgias
When I re-read the Odyssey, it felt like I was reading PD James or Minette Walters - you feel that you are sharing in something that hundreds of millions of people have read with love, and I think that this is worth holding onto. It is not a matter of canonical texts or elitism, which the universities are trying to make us wary about. It is about shared language and metaphor and experience and imagery and that is all good. — Robert Dessaix
Gracefully and gratefully accept the changes in our lives as casually and flexibly like a butterfly does." ~ Angelica Hopes, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul — Angelica Hopes
Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going. — Hunter S. Thompson
I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below. — Robert Fitzgerald
But sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away — Homer
The development of objective thinking by the Greeks appears to have required a number of specific cultural factors. First was the assembly, where men first learned to persuade one another by means of rational debate. Second was a maritime economy that prevented isolation and parochialism. Third was the existence of a widespread Greek-speaking world around which travelers and scholars could wander. Fourth was the existence of an independent merchant class that could hire its own teachers. Fifth was the Iliad and the Odyssey, literary masterpieces that are themselves the epitome of liberal rational thinking. Sixth was a literary religion not dominated by priests. And seventh was the persistence of these factors for 1,000 years. — Carl Sagan
In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. — Jorge Luis Borges
The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, as it pleases him, for he can do all things. — Homer
My real purpose in telling middle-school students stories was to practice telling stories. And I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. And the way I would justify it to the head teacher if he came in or to any parents who complained was, look, I'm telling these great stories because they're part of our cultural heritage. I did believe that. — Philip Pullman
Standing beneath the white light of an Apple store is like standing on a Stanley Kubrick movie set. His '2001: A Space Odyssey' predicted Jobs and a future where technology was our friend. Kubrick, of course, didn't like what he saw. And occasionally, I have my doubts. — Wesley Morris
The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women. — Gloria Steinem
The Greeks were so committed to ideas as supernatural forces that they created an entire group of goddesses (not one but nine) to represent creative power; the opening lines of both The Iliad and The Odyssey begin with calls to them. These nine goddesses, or muses, were the recipients of prayers from writers, engineers, and musicians. Even the great minds of the time, like Socrates and Plato, built shrines and visited temples dedicated to their particular muse (or muses, for those who hedged their bets). Right now, under our very secular noses, we honor these beliefs in our language, as the etymology of words like museum ("place of the muses") and music ("art of the muses") come from the Greek heritage of ideas as superhuman forces. — Scott Berkun
A voice expressing emotion in a musical way moves on. It's like the finale of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - the world turns in on itself, as a universe unto itself, in the shape of one human being. — Dwight Yoakam
I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times. — Philip Pullman
The story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water. There are too many inconsistencies. — Margaret Atwood
Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142) — Norman Fischer
Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man. — Willa Cather
Standing at the bathroom mirror, toweling off, I stare at my face. Red eyes, gray stubble - a face totally different from the one with which I started. But also different from the one I saw last year in this same mirror. Whoever I might be, I'm not the boy who started this odyssey, and I'm not even the man who announced three months ago that the odyssey was coming to an end. I'm like a tennis racket on which I've replaced the grip four times and the strings seven times - is it accurate to call it the same racket? — Andre Agassi
if there is a point to being in the canyon, it is not to rush but to linger, suspended in a blue-and-amber haze of in-between-ness, for as long as one possibly can. To float, to drift, savoring the pulse of the river on its odyssey through the canyon, and above all, to postpone the unwelcome and distinctly unpleasant moment when one is forced to reemerge and reenter the world beyond the rim-that is the paramount goal. — Kevin Fedarko
it would be fairer to say I have traveled widely, without ever leaving my own native soil, I've traveled, one might say, through literature, each time I've opened a book the pages echoed with a noise like the dip of a paddle in midstream, and throughout my odyssey I never crossed a single border, and so never had to produce a passport, I'd just pick a destination at random, setting my prejudices firmly to one side, and be welcomed with open arms in places swarming with weird and wonderful characters — Alain Mabanckou
It is amazing that 2001: A Space Odyssey has not aged at all, except for a few minor technical gadgets. The main reason is, of course, the philosophical or spiritual element in this story. We know as little today about the secrets of Creation and evolution as we knew before, and it is not likely that we'll ever know much more. We'll have to be satisfied, as Kubrick was, respectfully admiring the potential for evolution within the mystery of the universe's creation. — Jan Harlan
When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered. — Twyla Tharp
I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having. — Kiefer Sutherland