Quotes About Power

She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence.

They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles.

She brought the whole urgent universe wherever she went, portents and angry deities and a thousand looming perils.

I will not be silenced on my own island.

He was one of the greatest of our kind, and the drops that fell from him were golden, smearing his back with a terrible beauty.

In our stories these divinities had to work by wheedling and flattery, by favors won from stronger gods. They could not do much themselves. Except live, forever.

She thought that she had power to drive a wedge between us, but she had nothing.

Our goddess of the moon is gifted with magic, with power over the dead. She could banish the dreams, if she wished. She did not.

you may have what girls you like in the field, but you will bring none home, for only I will hold sway in your halls.

They gave her to a mortal, trying to shackle the child's power. Dilute him with humanity, diminish him.

The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad.

I looked down at my body, bare in the fire's light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father's fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks. […] I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

Penelope said, 'What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?' 'I do not know for certain,' I said. 'I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.' She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.

I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

Pharmakeia, such arts are called, for they deal in pharmaka, those herbs with the power to work changes upon the world, both those sprung from the blood of gods, as well as those which grow common upon the earth. It is a gift to be able to draw out their powers, and I am not alone in possessing

You do not command me. The silence went on and on, painful and breathless, like a singer overreaching to finish a phrase. Then,

There was violence in that room, with so many princes and heroes and kings competing for a single prize, but we knew how to ape civilization.

They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

The truce between the gods held only because Titans and Olympians each kept to their sphere.

I do not plan to tell her. Telegonus, these are gods. You must keep your tricks close or you will lose everything.

Such passive, pale words for what she was.

Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow.

Gods pretend to be parents, but they are children, clapping their hands and shouting for more.