50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Ransom

Download our list of Ransom quotes now!

#11: “Death is our nature. Without that fee paid in advance, the world does not come to us.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 4
• Techniques: Symbolism, metaphor

#12: “[Death] is the hard bargain life makes with us—with all of us, every one—and the condition we share. And for that reason, if for no other, we should have pity for one another’s losses.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 4
• Techniques: Symbolism, metaphor

#13: “Strip himself of all the ornaments of power, and with no concern any longer for pride or distinction, do what is most human – come as I do, a plain man white-haired and old, and entreat the killer of his son, with whatever small dignity is left him, to remember his own death, and the death of his father, and do as these things are honourably done among us, to take the ransom I bring and give me back my son.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 4
• Techniques: Symbolism

Storytelling and Empathy

#14: “he had entered the rough world of men where a man’s acts follow him wherever he goes in the form of a story”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1
• Techniques: Figurative language

#15: “She [Hecuba] resents having been brought so close to what she does not want to know or think about. That moment of standing beside him, even in imagination, in a crowd of dirty, wailing children…Dragging her in where she too would have that stink in her nostrils.”

• Character: Hecuba
• Part 2
• Techniques: Figurative language

#16: “It was as if you had found yourself peering through the crack in a door (exciting, Priam found, this imagining himself into a situation he would never have dreamed of acting out) and saw clearly for a moment into the fellow’s life, his world.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 3
• Techniques: Simile

#17: “And the desire to fill out the picture, to see her more clearly, led to something very unaccustomed indeed…Curiosity”

• Character: Priam
• Part 3
• Techniques: Characterisation, figurative language

#18: “‘We’re tied that way, all of us. Tied here,’ and he closed his fist and brought it to his chest to indicate the heart.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Figurative language

#19: “Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world.”

• Character: Hecuba
• Part 2
• Techniques: Figurative language

#20: “I appeal to you as a father”

• Character: Priam
• Part 4
• Techniques: Characterisation, parallel

#21: “Think, Achilles. Think of your son, Neoptolemus. Would you not do for him what I am doing here for Hector? Would your father, Peleus, not do the same for you?”

• Character: Priam
• Part 4
• Techniques: Rhetorical question

#22: “This old fellow [Somax], like most storytellers, is the stealer of other men’s tales, of other men’s lives”

• Character: Somax
• Part 5
• Techniques: Metaphor

#23: “The most remarkable thing about him [Somax] was that he was the owner of a little black mule who is still remembered in this part of the country and much talked about. A charming creature, big-eyed and sleek, she bore the name of Beauty—and very appropriately too, it seems, which is not always the case.

• Character: Somax
• Part 5
• Techniques: Symbolism

#24: “So many stories!”

• Character: Somax
• Part 5
• Techniques: Narrative voice

#25: “Its [Ransom’s] primary interest is in storytelling itself – why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling – and much of what it has to tell are ‘untold tales’ found only in the margins of earlier writers.”

• David Malouf
• The Afterword
• Techniques: Author’s purpose and context

Ransom Quotes about Leadership

#26: “The chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Figurative language

#27: “The sea has many voices. The voice this man is listening for is the voice of his mother”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1
• Techniques: Characterisation, metaphor, personification

#28: “This king who is in his care, for all his grave authority, is as innocent of the world as a naked newborn babe, and just as helpless”

• Character: Priam, Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Simile, characterisation

#29: “He is their leader, but he breaks daily every rule they have been taught to live by”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1
• Techniques: Characterisation

#30: “I’ve played my part, and tried to let nothing peep out of the real man inside so much empty shining”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Characterisation, figurative language

#31: “To be seen as a man like other men … would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Characterisation

#32: “To go today, immediately, to Achilles, just as I saw myself in my dream, plainly dressed and with no attendant but a driver for the cart – not as a king but as an ordinary man, a father, and offer him a ransom”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Symbolism

#33: “Why do we think always that the simple thing is beneath us? Because we are kings? What I do is what any man might do.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Characterisation

#34: “He is obliged, in his role as king, to think of the king’s sacred body, this brief six feet of earth he moves and breathes in—aches and sneezes and all—as at once a body like any other and an abstract of the lands he represents, their living map.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Metaphor, figurative language

#35: “The image I mean to leave is a living one.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Truncated sentence, characterisation 

#36: “The realm of the royal was representational, ideal… His whole life was like that, or had been. But out here, he discovered, everything was just itself. That was what seemed new.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 3
• Techniques: Contrast

#37: “Power lay in silence, not speech, was what was expressive”

• Character: Priam
• Part 3
• Techniques: Contrast

#38: “You’d think you could just give it to them, free, even if it meant a little tightening in your own chest.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Characterisation, contrast

#39: “Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different.” 

• Character: Priam
• Part 5
• Techniques: characterisation, genre convention

Grief Quotes from Ransom

#40: “He was waiting for the rage to fill him that would be equal at last to the outrage he was committing. That would assuage his grief, and be so convincing to the witnesses of this barbaric spectacle that he too might believe there was a living man at the centre of it, and that man himself.”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1
• Techniques: Characterisation

#41: “A world of pain, loss, dependency, bursts of violence and elation…at last of death.”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1
• Techniques: Emotive language

#42: “Somewhere in the depths of his sleep his spirit had made a crossing and not come back, or it had been snatched up and transformed.”

• Character: Achilles
• Part 1 
• Techniques: Metaphor, symbolism

#43: “The truth is, we don’t just lie down and die, do we, sir? We go on. For all our losses.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Truncated sentence

#44: “The worst happens, and there, it’s done. The fleas go on biting. The sun comes up again.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: metaphor

#45: “It was such a comfort just to hold on to her, and feel the warmth of her, and the scratchiness of her hide against my cheek. But whether it was for grief at my loss, or joy that she was safe, I can’t tell you, sir. We’re such contrary creatures. Maybe both.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Symbolism

#46: “Tears … oh, I have plenty of those. But not of grief. Of anger, fury, that I am a woman and can do nothing but sit here and rage and weep”

• Character: Hecuba
• Part 2
• Techniques: Characterisation

#47: “The grief that racks him is not only for his son Hector. It is also for a kingdom ravaged and threatened with extinction, for his wife, Hecuba, and the many songs of daughters and their children who stand under his weak protection.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 2
• Techniques: Figurative language

#48: “It leaves a gap you can’t ignore. It’s there. Always.”

• Character: Somax
• Part 3
• Techniques: Metaphor

#49: “And for him the misery of this moment will last forever; that is the hard fact he must live with. However the story is told and elaborated, the raw shame of it will be with him now till his last breath.”

• Character: Neoptolemus
• Part 5
• Techniques: Parallel

#50: “I come as a man of sorrow bringing the body of my son for burial, but I come also as the hero of the deed that till now was never attempted.”

• Character: Priam
• Part 5
• Techniques: Characterisation