But marrying within one’s own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.

The age of heroes had truly passed, and Tisamenus could not be one even if he burned for it. A great bronze wall had been erected around those old heroes, it descended from the sky, and no one could lift it or trespass there. Each age bestowed its own glory, but the age of my grandson could not be the age of Menelaus.

Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one’s human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death – in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.

Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth’s cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window.

No matter what they are in life, in memory they always seem to rearrange themselves in the opposite manner. All pleasures are seen as foreshortened and hasty and fleeting, and all pain lingering.

He ran both his hands through his hair, as if somehow that would straighten out his thoughts.

The war at Troy seemed to grow in song, poetry, and story all the while. As it faded from living memory, it grew larger and larger. Men claimed descent from one or the other of the heroes, or, failing that, anyone who had fought in the war, which now assumed the stature of a clash between the gods and the titans.

Life as a whole is not happy. Only moments. This is my moment. It will pass.

There are two kinds of tales: one accurate but not true, the other true but not accurate.

Omens. If I were beginning again, starting out in life, I would ignore all omens, neither heeding them nor trying to disable them. If we chose to pass them by, then perhaps they would lose their power, as old gods and goddesses, no longer worshiped, fade away and lose their grip on us.