Iliad quotes:

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The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. -- Aldous Huxley
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I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.' -- Kevin Bleyer
A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation. -- Raymond Queneau
The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history. -- Raymond Queneau
The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad. -- Richard Arnold Epstein
Make room, Roman writers, make room for Greek writers; something greater than the Iliad is born. -- Propertius
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It doesn't seem to me that anyone has discovered much that's new since the Iliad or the Odyssey. -- Raymond Queneau
One can easily classify all works of fiction either as descendants of the Iliad or of the Odyssey. -- Raymond Queneau
It's hard to write a war story without thinking about the 'Iliad.' Because the 'Iliad' knows everything about war. -- Chang-Rae Lee
Lastly, this threefold poetry flows from three great sources - The Bible, Homer, Shakespeare.... The Bible before the Iliad, the Iliad before Shakespeare. -- Victor Hugo
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 Odyssey and Iliad say things about the human condition in ways we should re-acquaint ourselves with, and use as a prism to interpret though. -- Robert Dessaix
I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad. -- Andre Dubus
He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. -- Matthew Arnold
Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nordrove back Xerxes, nor christianized the world, nor abolished slavery. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
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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
The Iliad represents no creed nor opinion, and we read it with a rare sense of freedom and irresponsibility, as if we trod on native ground, and were autochthones of the soil. -- Henry David Thoreau
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies. -- Katharine Fullerton Gerould
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
Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past. -- Thomas Carlyle
There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
I wanted to know if the 'Iliad' in the original was as relevant and contemporary as it was in translation. I then started Latin. I had finally found something I enjoyed and was good at: dead languages! -- Caroline Lawrence
In the power and splendor of the universe, inspiration waits for the millions to come. Man has only to strive for it. Poems greater than the Iliad, plays greater than Macbeth, stories more engaging than Don Quixote await their seeker and finder. -- John Masefield
When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.' -- Franz Wright
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, youll see something of the difference between Homers poetry and anyone elses. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the Iliad, real animals, real people, real light attending everything. -- Alice Oswald
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
If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything. -- Alice Oswald
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I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. -- Alice Oswald
Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes. -- Alice Oswald
One of the rules of Greek lament poetry is that it mustn't mention the dead by name in case of invoking a ghost. Maybe the 'Iliad,' crowded with names, is more than a poem. Maybe it's a dangerous piece of the brightness of both this world and the next. -- Alice Oswald
The Bible is to religion what the Iliad is to poetry -- Joseph Joubert
Something greater than the Iliad now springs to birth -Nescio quid maius nascitur Iliade -- Propertius
Troy is based on the epic poem The Iliad by Homer , according to the credits. Homer's estate should sue. -- Roger Ebert
Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order. -- Harold Bloom
If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
My business is to succeed, and I'm good at it. I create my Iliad by my actions, create it day by day. -- Napoleon Bonaparte
The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle. -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality. -- Simone Weil
Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to. -- Elie Wiesel
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
If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.' -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
No particular music makes me feel nostalgic. If it's great, it just keeps me in the present moment. That level of music is like a classic story, like the Iliad-something so perfect it can never be old. -- Wynton Marsalis
In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad. -- Henry David Thoreau
There are no laws by which we can write Iliads. -- John Ruskin
And overpowered by memory Both men gave way to grief. Priam wept freely For man - killing Hector, throbbing, crouching Before Achilles' feet as Achilles wept himself, Now for his father, now for Patroclus once again And their sobbing rose and fell throughout the house. -- Homer
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The genuine remains of Ossian, or those ancient poems which bear his name, though of less fame and extent, are, in many respects,of the same stamp with the Iliad itself. He asserts the dignity of the bard no less than Homer, and in his era, we hear of no other priest than he. -- Henry David Thoreau
In Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth than in the more modern and moral poets. The Iliad is not Sabbath but morning reading, and men cling to this old song, because they still have moments of unbaptized and uncommitted life, which give them an appetite for more. -- Henry David Thoreau
If atoms do, by chance, happen to combine themselves into so many shapes, why have they never combined together to form a house or a slipper? By the same token, why do we not believe that if innumerable letters of the Greek alphabet were poured all over the market-place they would eventually happen to form the text of the Iliad? -- Michel de Montaigne

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