Cassandra Quotes

“He smiled at that, and then his gaze shifted to a spot over my shoulder and it faded. 'These doubts wouldn’t have anything to do with the company you’re keeping of late, would they?'
I didn’t get a chance to answer before the shop door was thrown open and a furious war mage stomped in. Pritkin spotted me and his eyes narrowed.
'You shaved my legs?!'
Mircea looked at me and folded his arms across his chest. I looked from one unhappy face to the other and suddenly remembered that I had somewhere else to be.”
― Karen Chance, Curse the Dawn

“Whither thou goest, I will go;
Where thou diest, will I die
And there will I be buried:
The Angel do so to me, and more also,
If aught but death part thee and me.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Closed door means knock," Elena said to Clay, shooing him out.
You've been in here for two hours," he said. "She can't need that much work." He frowned as he examined my outfit. "What the hell is she? A tree?"
"A dryad," Elena said, cuffing him in the arm.
"Oh, my god," Jamie said, surveying my outfit. "We forgot the bag!"
"Bag?" Clay said. "What does a dryad need with-"
"An evening bag," Cassandra said. "A purse."
"She's got a purse. It's right there on the bed."
"That's a day purse," Cassandra snapped.
"What, do they expire when the sun goes down?”
― Kelley Armstrong, Industrial Magic

“Not really hungry."
"She’ll eat." Pritkin said curtly.
"I said —"
"If you starve to death it would damage my professional reputation."
"I eat plenty."
"The same does not apply should I strangle you in understandable irritation, however."
"I’ll have a sandwich," I told Nick. "No meat.”
― Karen Chance, Embrace the Night

“Great. I'd been dumped in Hell's waiting room.”
― Karen Chance, Touch the Dark

“He banged on the side of the carriage. "Thomas! We must away at once to the nearest brothel. I seek scandal and low companionship.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I dodged behind Mac for cover and refused to take the bait. I glanced at my nonexistent watch. 'Oops, look at the time. Guess I have to be going now. Let's not do this again sometime, okay?'
Before I could move, Pritkin was there, jamming the medallion into the skin of my upper arm.'Ow!'He looked at me expectantly. I glared at him. 'That hurt!'
What do you see?'
A big red mark,”
― Karen Chance, Claimed by Shadow

“The most temptation I'd experienced had been with Tomas, the Senate's spy who had been feeding off me without permission, and Mircea, who was probably plotting some nefarious scheme. I have no taste in men.”
― Karen Chance, Touch the Dark

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris,' the ghost said, after taking a drag on a small cigarette.
But you’re not dead. I suppose the question must be, are you good?”
― Karen Chance, Embrace the Night

“She's magic, Cassandra. A single flower blooming in an endless desert.”
― Anne Bishop, Daughter of the Blood

“If I'd had enough breath, I would have screamed, both at the sensation and at the sheer pettiness of the bastard who wouldn't allow me even a tiny chance of escape.”
― Karen Chance, Touch the Dark

“Surely, she was too young to have so many ghosts.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Heavenly Fire

“The lord whose is the oracle at Delphoi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign.

The Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her.”
― Heraclitus

“I am Cassandra—she who, without asking,
understood it all and still came to her fate,
I, Cassandra, full of visions,
who sees her own death without turning away,
and hears in the night the day that follows.”
― Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral

“Well, either you have a compartment under this floor, containing a living person, or the property is infested by giant moles”
― Kelley Armstrong, Spell Bound

“Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,
And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,
And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.
Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,
Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,
And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.

With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,
And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,
With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,
She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;
While the earth dreamed, and only I was ware
Of that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.

The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;
There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.
Nor any mournful music in her streams:
Only I saw the shadow on her brows,
Only I knew her for the yearly slain,
And wept, and weep until she come again.”
― Frederic Manning

“If I’d found out that Norman Mailer liked me, I’d have killed myself. I think he was too hung up. I’m glad Kurt Vonnegut didn’t like me either. He had problems, terrible problems. He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too over optimistic.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I willingly accept Cassandra's fate
To speak the truth, although believed too late.”
― Anne Killigrew

“Her laugh was a travesty. Which made sense because in a way, so was his apology. But what was he supposed to say?

I want you until I hurt. Until I sweat.
I love you with a raw, bleeding need that I've never understood.

And all I know for sure is that you can never be mine.”
― Jessica Bird, From the First

“...I'd never want my muse
to be a singer of nothing but disaster.”
― Euripides, The Trojan Women

“—Pues la pillará algún día —insistió Pandora con aire ominoso—, si es que no la ha pillado ya. Y luego me la transmitirá a mí. —Estás siendo muy dramática. Y no todos los libertinos tienen sífilis.
—Le pienso preguntar.
—¡Pandora, no lo hagas! Ese pobre hombre se asustará.
—También me asustaré yo si termino perdiendo la nariz.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Spring

“Aquí fue. Ahí estaba. Esos leones de piedra, sin cabeza ahora, la miraron. Esa fortaleza, un día inexpugnable, ahora un montón de piedras, fue lo último que vio. Un enemigo hace tiempo olvidado y los siglos, sol, lluvia y viento, la arrasaron. Inalterado el cielo, un bloque azul intenso, alto, dilatado. Cerca las murallas ciclópeamente ensambladas, hoy como ayer, que marcan su dirección al caminar: hacia la puerta, bajo la cual no mana la sangre. Hacia lo tenebroso. Hacia el matadero. Y sola.
Con mi relato voy hacia la muerte.”
― Christa Wolf

“For my father, the myth of Cassandra had been just another way he sought to guide me toward what he thought I needed to know. In some versions, Cassandra's fate is that she is merely misunderstood--not unlike what my father imagined to be the obvious fate of a mixed-race child born in a place like Mississippi. "She was a prophet," he told me, "but no one would believe her." Over the years, though, this second naming would come to weigh heavily on me. It was as if, in giving me that name, he had given me not only the burden of foresight but also the notion of causation--that whatever it was, if I could imagine it, see it in my mind's eye, it would happen because I had envisioned it. As if I had willed it into being.”
― Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir

“Here I am, Cassandra.
And this is my city under ashes.
And these are my prophet's staff and ribbons.
And this is my head full of doubts.”
― Wisława Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

“I had felt the grip of his immortal hands on me. I had felt the burn of his venom in my mouth. The memory of it flowed in my bloodstream; the echo of his touch imprinted on my skin; the visions he had given me flickered and twisted in my head, all of them fighting for supremacy, never settling into one clear picture.”
― Jennifer Saint, Elektra

“I imagined myself as a beautiful Cassandra, wandering vast and lonely halls, spilling prophecies that everyone laughed at, only to watch them come tragically true in the end. This feeling of mutedness, of injustice, was particularly strong in me, though I had no particular prophecies to tell, no clear-sighted warnings.”
― Lauren Groff, Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories

“Cassandra, foreseeing not the end of Troy, but the end of everything that came after Troy. The victory of Greece remains the most important victory of our history; it not only inspired the first text of Western literature but perhaps is the very text of ‘the West’ itself. This victory, prefigured in the mad rants of the woman who defied the god of truth, could not have been won if anyone had listened to Cassandra. But then again, she did not die before she took her madness into the heart of Greece: it echoed through Agamemnon’s palace, through Aeschylus’s Oresteia, continued as shout and murmur through literature. Nonetheless, the book that frames these screams is called (defiantly perhaps?) a science, and gay.”
― Silke-Maria Weineck, The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche

“Immersa oltre la città, oltre la folla e la silenziosa follia della non-morte, la attraversava senza confondervisi.”
― Niccolò R.V. Toderi, Verbum. Custos Verbi

“Non è giusto... non c'è giustizia né vita in ciò che resta dell'umanità" sussurrò appena lei.”
― Niccolò R.V. Toderi, Verbum. Custos Verbi

“I was the victim of both social orders: of Apollo’s waxing patriarchy, & of Clytemnestra’s last spasms of outraged matriarchy. My father Priam probably would have said: that I had asked for it. That no society could be expected to tolerate an individual who insisted on telling the truth.”
― Ursule Molinaro, The Autobiography of Cassandra, Princess & Prophetess of Troy