Gates Of Fire Quotes

"I had always wondered what it felt like to die."

"Loss encompassed me with a searing, all-mastering pain."

"The knowledge of my mother and father's slaughter struck me less with grief for them or fear for myself than with the imperative to assume at once their station."

"Life had become like a play, a tragedy one had seen enacted on the stage."

"We advance Lord of the Thunder Our Hope and our Protector."

"If you find a town, don’t bring the girl in or this will happen again."

"Ghosts, those that cannot let go their bond to the living, linger and haunt the scenes of their days."

"She fears that she may never be a man’s wife now but only a slave or a whore."

"It was every man for himself now; every clan, every kin group."

"This is our country," their boy-lord warned me.

"We crunched the little hollow bones; we ate the eyes, and the legs right down to the boot."

"Why won’t you talk to me anymore? Can’t I put my head in your lap like we used to?"

"You will be like them," she said, "when you grow."

"This shows what a fool I have become. No one will marry me."

"The love I might have given my own children, I gave to you."

"A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery."

"Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line."

"This flesh, this body, does not belong to us... It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital."

"The race of Egyptians is an ancient one, numbering the generations of its fathers by the hundreds into antiquity. We have seen empires come and go. We have ruled and been ruled."

"The wheel turns, and man must turn with it. To resist is not mere folly, but madness."

"You have never tasted freedom, friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel."

"For the warrior, the seasons are marked not by these sweet measures nor by the calendared years themselves, but by battles."

"His history is carved upon his person with the stylus of steel, his alphabet engraved with spear and sword indelibly upon the flesh."

"This is my shield. I bear it before me into battle, but it is not mine alone. It protects my brother on my left. It protects my city. I will die with my shield before me facing the enemy."

"Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor."

"As a string of the kithera vibrates purely... so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit."

"In passion it unites husband to wife, lover to lover, in wordless perfect union."

"In piety exoterike harmonia produces that silent symphony which most delights the ears of the gods."

"We talked for hours in secret on the pursuit of esoterike harmonia, that state of self-composure which the exercises of the phobologia are designed to produce."

"What are you gaping at! It's over! Let him be!"

"The heart stopped in awe, the hair stood straight up upon the neck and shivers coursed powerfully the length of the spine."

"The gods, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day."

"He could not fight at all if he did not do this."

"I spit on this King's crown. I wipe my ass on his throne, which is the seat of a slave and which seeks nothing more noble than to make all other men slaves."

"They have dumped their guts not in this piss-puddle war we fought today, but in the first of many battles in the greater war which God in heaven and all of you in your hearts know is coming."

"I can't count past thirty-six" was his standard disclaimer. "Beyond that, I get dizzy."

"What are they to you, moron? Your city was sacked, they say. You hate the Argives and think these sons of Herakles are their enemies. Wake up! What do you think they would have done had they sacked your city? The same and worse!"

"I can run as fast as any of these Spartan dick-strokers. I’m fourteen but I’ll fight any twenty-year-old man-to-man and bring him down."

"But by the gods, I swore to him, raise your hand once against them, any one of them, and I’ll kill you."

"War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man."

"Man is weak, greedy, craven, lustful, prey to every species of vice and depravity."

"We spend tears now that we may conserve blood later."

"The secret shame of the warrior, the knowledge within his own heart that he could have done better, done more, done it more swiftly or with less self-preserving hesitation."

"Remember what I told you about the house with many rooms. There are rooms we must not enter. Anger. Fear."

"To plunge a spear, blade-deep, into a man’s guts is like fucking, only better."

"This was how they learned. The lesson today was how to grill a boy in service. How a lady did it. What tone she took, what questions she asked."

"It's for a friend," I told her. "I cannot answer it myself, being too young and knowing too little of the world."

"This friend...he believes that once, when he was a child, alone at the point of death, he was spoken to by a god."

"Men think with their minds, the lady said; women with their blood, which is tidal and flows at the discretion of the moon."

"That which he saw was truth. His vision indeed was of the god."

"Such passion was holy, inspired by heaven, and must not be repented or apologized for."

"We will speak of her son, and the unhappy portion the gods have set out before him."

"You are something of an archer yourself, I understand, and far advanced for your years."

"The qualities of a good battle squire are simple enough. He must be dumb as a mule, numb as a post and obedient as an imbecile."

"With luck, you might even get in a potshot at the enemy."

"The Greeks will trample one another's bones, racing to see who first can sell his freedom."

"What were you thinking when you turned them down? What they offered you is an honor."

"Who knows how many of them followed Rooster in their hearts?"

"You own more of valor than I ever will," the bastard replied, "for you manufacture it out of a tender heart, while the gods sat me up punching and kicking from the cradle."

"Truth is an immortal goddess, lady," the senior Medon spoke sternly. "One would be wise to consider before defaming her."

"The gods remain always a jump ahead of us, don't they, Xeo?"

"You would not be the first husband bound by love to someone other than his wife. Nor she the first wife."

"No mortal can be lonelier or more isolated than He who sits upon it."

"Each voice vowing allegiance, each heart declaring love, the Royal Listener must probe and examine as if He were a vendor in a bazaar, seeking the subtle indices of betrayal and deceit."

"Victory cannot simply be declared, it must be won. And won, if I may say so, in person."

"Consider the crossing at which we now stand encamped, that site the Hellenes call the Three-Cornered Way. It would be nothing to us, mere dirt beneath our feet. Yet is not this humble plot given meaning, and even charm, to recall from the prisoner’s tale that he, as a child, parted here from the maiden Diomache, his cousin whom he loved?"

"The gods could not have crafted a face more open or touching to my heart."

"But to my eyes he appeared eueidestatos, the soul of beauty."

"My husband embraced this love and returned it in kind, both of us over the still-warm bones of his brother. The delight was so keen between us, our secret joy in the marriage bed, that this love itself became a curse to us."

"The gods make us love whom we will not, and disrequite whom we will. They slay those who should live and spare those who deserve to die. They give with one hand and take with the other, answerable only to their own unknowable laws."

"The wives of other cities marvel at the women of Lakedaemon. How, they ask, can these Spartan wives stand erect and unblinking as their husbands' broken bodies are borne home to a grave or, worse, interred beneath some foreign dirt with nothing save cold memory to clutch to their hearts?"

"Men's pain is lightly borne and swiftly over. Our wounds are of the flesh, which is nothing; women's is of the heart—sorrow unending, far more bitter to bear."

"Nothing good in life comes but at a price. Sweetest of all is liberty. This we have chosen and this we pay for."

"Good. Then we'll have our battle in the shade."

"Remember that the Persian's most formidable weapons, his cavalry and his multitudes of archers and slingers, are rendered impotent here by the terrain."

"Wherever the fighting is bloodiest, you may expect to discover the Lakedaemonians in the forefront."

"Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack."

"We cobble our courage together on the spot, of rags and remnants."

"Fear of proving ourselves unworthy of our wives and children, our brothers, our comrades-in-arms."

"The closest I’ve come is to act despite terror."

"Perhaps the god we seek is not a god at all, but a goddess."

"What is more natural to a man than to fight, or a woman to love?"

"That women, from some source unknown to us, summon the will to conquer this their own deepest nature is, I believe, the reason we stand in awe of our mothers and sisters and wives."

"Honor and glory are boons which cannot be granted by the pen but must be earned by the spear."

"Nothing fires the warrior's heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one's own bowels or guts but from one's own discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions."

"The warrior in these moments finds himself lifted as if by the hand of a god. He cannot tell where his being leaves off and that of the comrade beside him begins."

"War is work, Dienekes had always taught, seeking to strip it of its mystery."

"I was firing between the helmets of the warriors, point-blank into the faces and throats of the foe. This was not archery, it was slaughter."

"Who can say by what unspoken timbre the tidal flow of the fight is communicated within the massed ranks?"

"The enemy knew it too. They could feel their line caving in."

"The slaughter surpassed the mind's capacity to assimilate it."

"In the crush of the phalanx each man could sense the sea change as the rush of emergency passed like a wave, replaced by the steadying, settling sensation of fear passing over, composure returning and the drill settling to the murderous work of war."

"The ground immediately to the rear of the Spartan advance, as expected, was littered with the trampled forms of the enemy dead and wounded. But there was a new wrinkle. The Medes had been overrun with such speed and force that numbers of them, far from inconsiderable, had survived intact."

"All knew that the next attack would be the day’s last; nightfall’s curtain would adjourn the slaughter until tomorrow."

"Acts of barbarity which had been hitherto unthinkable now presented themselves to the mind and were embraced without a quibble."

"Our bravery is nothing alongside these heroes’."

"Do you think the gods look down on us as we do upon these insects?"

"Let neither of us pity the other," my cousin spoke in parting. "We are where we must be, and we will do what we must."

"It’s too late, don’t you think, for you and I to keep secrets from one another?"

"I despise that seizure of self-preservation which unmanned these cravens last night," Dienekes addressed the thronging allies, "but far more I hate that passion, comrades, which deranges you now."