The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?” (A Thousand Ships Quotes)
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“But it is surprising that he hasn’t considered how many other men there are like him, every day, all demanding my unwavering attention and support. How much epic poetry does the world really need?”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“But this is a women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“He is learning that in any war, the victors may be destroyed as completely as the vanquished. They still have their lives, but they have given up everything else in order to keep them. They sacrifice what they do not realize they have until they have lost it. And so the man who can win the war can only rarely survive the peace.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“Heroism is something that can reside in all of us, particularly if circumstances push it to the fore. It doesn’t belong to men, any more than the tragic consequences of war belong to women. Survivors, victims, perpetrators: these roles are not always separate. People can be wounded and wounding at the same time, or at different times in the same life.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialised as much as any other person.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“She had spent ten years locked inside Troy and had walked its paths countless times. She knew every house, every corner, every twist and turn.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung. I have sung of armies and I have sung of men. I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies. I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain. I have sung of life after death. And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
“Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty.”
Natalie Haynes
A Thousand Ships
