Electra Quotes

“I ask this one thing: let me go mad in my own way.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Yes it will be a grace if I die. To exist is pain. Life is no desire of mine anymore.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“ORESTES: Never shall I see you again.

ELECTRA: Nor I see myself in your eyes.

ORESTES: This, the last time I'll talk with you ever.

ELECTRA: O my homeland, goodbye. Goodbye to you, women of home.

ORESTES: Most loyal of sisters, do you leave now?

ELECTRA: I leave with tears blurring all that I see.”
― Euripides, Electra

“Not from Hades' black and universal lake can you lift him. Not by groaning, not by prayers. Yet you run yourself out in a grief with no cure, no time-limit, no measure. It is a knot no one can untie. Why are you so in love with things unbearable?”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I am at the end. I exist no more.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“ORESTES: Just to see the outline of your suffering

ELECTRA: Yet this is only a fraction of it you see.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You're dreaming, girl, lost in a moving dream.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“What an ugly, loveless life for a girl.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Think again, Electra. Don't say anymore. Don't you see what you're doing? You make your own pain. Why keep wounding yourself? With so much evil stored up in that cold dark soul of yours you breed enemies everywhere you touch.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Shame I do feel. And I know there is something all wrong about me—believe me. Sometimes I shock myself.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I will not live by rules like those.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“All my love gone for nothing. Days of my love, years of my love.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“ELECTRA: Oh but my love—now that you have travelled back down all those years to meet my heart, over all this grief of mine, do not oh love—

ORESTES: What are you asking?

ELECTRA: Do not turn your face from me. Don't take yourself away.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Orestes beloved. as you die you destroy me. You have torn away the part of my mind where hope was .”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Yes I know sorrow. Know it far too well. My life is a tunnel choked by the sweepings of dread.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Oh my love take me there. Let me dwell where you are. I am already nothing, I am already burning. Oh my love, I was once part of you—take me too!”
― Sophocles, Electra

“This is Electra. Brilliant no more.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Because she—you hear her—she's calling,
and is always going to call, and it's better
both of us die by the dagger without anyone
seeing us, Orestes, and die a fit death.”
― Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral

“Electra, grieving for death, for her father, as a nightingale grieving always.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“And instead my beloved, luck sent you back to me colder than ashes, later than shadow.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You are nothing at all. Just a crack where the light slipped through.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Last night was a night of bad dreams and ambiguous visions.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“But death was a wind too strong for that.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Careful! There is war in women too, as you know by experience, I think.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“You drive me back down my desperation—that unclouded incurable never forgotten evil growing inside my life.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Here he comes like a stealing shadow, like a footprint of death into the rooms, stalking the past with freshcut blood in his hands.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Not long now: the blazing dream of my head is crawling out.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“I, Electra, fingering my garments
and my face, for in hours I was changed.
Now I am merely one who has killed.”
― Gabriela Mistral, Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral

“Que antes ti haya una mesa colmada y te sea la vida fácil. ¡Que tenga yo por único alimento el no contradecirme a mí misma!”
― Sófocles, Electra