“In college, reading all those Greek tragedies and listening to the lectures about them, I would think, rather blithely, 'Well, that tragic flaw thing is nicely symmetrical: whatever makes Oedipus heroic is also—' What did I know then? Nothing. I didn’t feel in my bones as I do now that what powers our drive assures our downfall, that our birth date is our death sentence. You’re fated to kill your dad and marry your mom, so they send you away. You live with your new mom and dad, find out about the curse, run off and kill your real dad, marry your real mom. It was a setup. You had to test it. Even though you knew it would cost you your eyes, you had to do it. You had to push ahead. You had to prove who you are.”
— David Shields, How Literature Saved My Life
Tagged: Identity, Oedipus
Appears In: Quotes To Make You Smile
Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Read:
How Literature Saved My Life

Explore more quotes:

Beach Quotes (42)
Deep Quotes (500)
Encouraging Quotes (30)
Funny Quotes (120)
Inspirational Quotes (501)
Quotes about Love (854)
TV Quotes (1,000+)
Movie Quotes (1,000+)

About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.