Quotes from Stephen Fry

Absolutely,' lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else's dreams.

We all know that drugs, alcohol and tobacco are Bad, but work, we are brought up to believe, is Good. As a result the world is full of families who are angry at being abandoned and breadwinners who are even more angry because their hours of labour are not sufficiently appreciated.

Everyone else new you ever meet, and this continues through life, is stronger than you are, knows the system better and sees right through to the back of your brain and finds what they see to be wholly inadequate. Everyone you encounter carries, as it were, a huge club behind their back, while all you hold behind yours is a weedy cotton-bud.

He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS and RHEA.

Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.

But when the day came, Admetus had a radical change of heart. He realized how much he loved Alcestis and how much less of a life he would have without her. In fact, he now saw that a long and endless existence alone would be worse than death.

Because it's not perfect, let's not bother. That's crazy! Even if we take three steps forward and two and a half back it's still going half a foot forward.

Unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing

The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: "A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes." No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves.

Bij onze geboorte ligt ons lot al vast, en niemand heeft ooit het zijne kunnen ontlopen (Hektor)

There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

Men! It's not that they're brutish, boorish, shallow, and insensitive—though I dare say many are. It's just that they're so damned blind. So incredibly stupid. Men in myth and fiction at least. In real life we are keen, clever, and entirely without fault, of course.

Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

The poor bloody poet can no longer say "ope" for "open," or "swain" for "youth," he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

Zelfs de onsterfelijke goden waren niet bij machte zich te verhouden tot, mee te leven met, nakomelingen te verwekken bij en het lot te bepalen van zo'n aanzwellende schare eerzuchtige, vernuftige en egocentrische wezens.

I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: "thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word 'thaumaturge.'" And I suppose that was true, since I've never forgotten it.

triskaidekaphobic.

pollute any happiness or satisfaction he might have enjoyed as king. Consigned to the Dust After many years of peace and prosperity in Thebes, Cadmus and

And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.

Agamemnon heaved the gusty sigh of one much put upon by the weight of office, the malice of chance, and the endless incompetence of underlings.