Ovid Exile Quotes & Sayings

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

Give me the waters of Lethe that numb the heart, if they exist, I will still not have the power to forget you. — Ovid

I am an exile; but it is the fault that pains;
The punishment is nought; that it is deserved
Is all the pain. — Ovid

Our native soil draws all of us, by I know not what sweetness, and never allows us to forget. — Ovid

Only the mind cannot be sent into exile. — Ovid

It's a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes. — Ovid