Sappho Quotes

Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism. (Camille Paglia)

Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.

Camille Paglia

Truly, I wish I were dead. She was weeping when she left me, and said many things to me, and said this: "How much we have suffered, Sappho. Truly, I don't want to leave you."

Sappho

Know thyself,' said Socrates. Know thyself,' said Sappho, ‘and make sure that the Church never finds out.

Jeanette Winterson

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.

Erica Jong

I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.

Camille Paglia

How should they know that Sappho lived and died Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover, Never transfused and lost in what she loved, Never so wholly loving nor at peace.

Sara Teasdale

Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing From the immense blue circle of the sea, And the soft thunder where long waves whiten - These were the same for Sappho as for me. Two thousand years - much has gone by forever, Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men - But here on the beaches that time passes over The heart aches now as then.

Sara Teasdale

But the act, called the sexual act, is not for the depositing of seed. It is for leaping off into the unknown, as from a cliff's edge, like Sappho into the sea.

D. H. Lawrence

The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring - as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."

Kenneth Rexroth

Sappho was a worshipper of the Aphrodite cult and on the island of Lesbos there were many cliff-jumpers. They all jumped. Some may say they flew in ecstasy. If only for nine seconds -- one second for each string of the lyre. (Peter Greenaway)

Raise a song for her, O Muse! The violet-crownèd maiden, And praise her soft throat's changing hues, Her low voice, laughter-laden. Sing yet again her thousand charms, Her eyes entrancing splendour, Her swarthy cheeks and supple arms And bosom dark and tender. Yea, sing forevermore of her, My mistress soft-beguiling, Fairest of all who are, or were, My Sappho, sweetly-smiling.

Alcaeus of Mytilene

O violet-tressed Sappho chaste, O maid with honeyed smile! I fain would tell what is in my breast, Did shame me not beguile.

Alcaeus of Mytilene

Sappho survives, because we sing her songs And schylus, because we read his plays.

Robert Browning

And bold Stesichorus and rash Sappho, who feared not Leucas but took the manly leap.

Statius