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Oedipus Quotes

Browse 38 quotes about Oedipus.

Oedipus Quotes

“It is not by means of a metaphor that a banking or stock-market transaction, a claim, a coupon, a credit, is able to arouse people who are not necessarily bankers. And what about the effects of money that grows, money that produces more money? There are socioeconomic "complexes" that are also veritable complexes of the unconscious, and that communicate a voluptuous wave from the top to the bottom of their hierarchy (the military-industrial complex). And ideology, Oedipus, and the phallus have nothing to do with this, because they depend on it rather than being its impetus. For it is a matter of flows, of stocks, of breaks in and fluctuations of flows; desire is present wherever something flows and runs, carrying along with it interested subjects—but also drunken or slumbering subjects—toward lethal destinations.”

DesireOedipusFlowsStock Markets
Author:Gilles Deleuze
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“So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply. You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.”

HumorPsychologyCleverAllusionOedipusJulian BarnesThe Only StoryOedipal
Book:The Only Story
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“We defend so cautiously against our egoically limited experiences, states Laing in The Politics of Experience, that it is not surprising to see people grow defensive and panic at the idea of experiencing ego-loss through the use of drugs or collective experiences. But there is nothing pathological about ego-loss, Laing adds; quite the contrary. Ego-loss is the experience of all mankind, "of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even [a journey] further into the beings of animals, vegetables and minerals." No age, Laing concludes, has so lost touch with this healing process as has ours. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic approach serves to begin such a healing process. Its major task is to destroy the oedipalized and neuroticized individual dependencies through the forging of a collective subjectivity, a nonfascist subject—anti-Oedipus. Anti-Oedipus is an individual or a group that no longer functions in terms of beliefs and that comes to redeem mankind, as Nietzsche foresaw, not only from the ideals that weighed it down, "but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the earth and his hope to man; this Antichrist and antinihilist. . . He must come one day.—”

HealingSchizophreniaNietzscheAntichristEgo DeathOedipusAnti OedipusEgo LossSchizoanalyitic
Book:Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
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“What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason — instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

PeopleTryingReasonGuyTragedyInstitutionsNotionSelfishAssGreekNo ReasonLightningHittingIndifferentDoomedBoltsAchillesOlympianPostmodernGreek TragedyWhippingHurlingOedipusLightning BoltsOlympian Gods
Author:David Simon
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“At the time I was first writing the stories/essays that appear in Oedipus Wrecked, I was still under the impression that people would be delighted to see their name in print. I overlooked the fact that I was writing about intimate matters, and people are a bit touchy about airing their private lives in such a public fashion. Especially when it's done without their consent.”

PeopleWritingFirstsStillsMatterDoneFactsStoriesWould BeNamesBitsFashionImpressionIntimatePrintConsentEssaysPrivate LifeDelightedOverlookedTouchyOedipus
Author:Kevin Keck
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“I like violence because I like looking at it and I like understanding emotional and physical violence and how they work with one another... It's operating in all these levels of hopefully - Oedipus is one of my favorite stories, that's like falling down a well when you read that - so that would be the hope, that each thing causes the next.”

WellsStoriesWould BeFallNextCausesUnderstandingLevelsViolenceEmotionalMy FavoriteHopefullyFalling DownOedipusPhysical Violence
Author:Kimberly Peirce
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“I never know who's influencing me at any time. I mean, I can take a play by Brecht and adapt it, I'm consciously adapting that play, or, as I've done with the Greek classics, Euripides and Oedipus, and I'm consciously adapting that play. Whether it influences me or not, I think it's the critics, the analysts who have to decide that. Me, I don't feel that I'm under the influence of any such sources.”

ThinkingKnowsFeelsMeanI CanDonePlayInfluenceSourceCriticsGreekAnalystsAdaptingBrechtOedipus
Author:Wole Soyinka
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“I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama's boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.”

TwoYoungHalfBoysTasksPityDozenYoung WomenMamaCocktailsOedipusBulldozersMolotovMolotov CocktailMama's Boy
Book:Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
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“Samoa culture demonstrates how much the tragic or the easy solution of the Oedipus situation depends upon the inter-relationship between parents and children, and is not created out of whole cloth by the young child's biological impulses.”

ChildrenWholeYoungScienceCultureEasyParentSituationDependsSolutionsImpulseTragicYoung ChildrenChildren And ParentsOedipusSamoa
Book:Male and female: a study of the sexes in a changing world
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“Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?”

IfsWayStoriesLawFatherLiteraturePleasureConflictHatredStorytellingNarrativeTendernessEnteringDialecticsOedipus
Book:How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces
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“Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit and gives them a reminder that daily drabness is not necessarily all.”

WorldGivingFacesSpiritThreeAnswersAudienceFireStageInvisibleRemindersPositivelyOedipusThree Sisters
Author:Peter Brook
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“I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.”

PeopleIfsHumansLooksHas BeensCharacterEasyGoalEmotionSituationWonderHungryCraftsPlotCynicalNot InterestedAugustusOedipusBlackface
Author:Rita Dove
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“It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further.”

HeartPhilosophyFacesAnswersFateDivineTerribleHorrorEnlightenmentCleanSakePhilosopherSeekingPursueBreastsInquiryOedipus
Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
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