Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Now, for the first time in all my life (and the last) I was gay. A new world, very bright, seemed to be opening all round me.
It was of course the gods' old trick; blow the bubble up big before you prick it.

"You've had the sweet, Grandfather. There's sour to follow."
"Let me hear it. All is to be borne."

I felt as, I suppose, a tortured prisoner feels when they dash water in his face to rouse him from his faint, and the truth, worse than all his fantasies, becomes clear and hard and unmistakable again around him.

What is the use of a sign which is itself only another riddle?

I learned then how one can hate those one loves.

I was at that very moment when, if they meant us well, the gods would speak.

I don't know whether the journey up the mountain was long or short. Each bit of it was long; I noticed every pebble on the road, I looked long, long at every tree as we passed it. Yet the whole journey seemed to take hardly any time.

I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.

Love is too young to know what conscience is