If we imagine an ancient road at dusk, a road passing through no-man’s-land and connecting two towns but itself neither here nor there, we will begin to imagine the ancient Hermes…identified not with any home or hearth or mountain but with the traveler on the highway.
—Lewis Hyde, The Gift
Theirs is a world where boundaries are intentionally porous, slipping through borders goes unnoticed, and confusing algorithms and defying legibility is encouraged.
—Sophia Giovannitti, Working Girl
It's been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free.
—Larry Mitchell, The Faggots And Their Friends Between Revolutions
See someone's got to tell the tale.
Whether or not it turns out well.
Maybe it will turn out this time.
On the road to hell, on the railroad line.
—Hermes in Road to Hell from Hadestown the Musical
"But seriously, I'm ready to do whatever I must so that you and I will never go hungry. You're wrong to insist we live in a place like this. Why should we be the only gods who never eat the fruits of sacrifice and prayer? Better always to live in the company of other deathless ones—rich, glamarous, enjoying heaps of grain—than forever to sit by outselves in a gloomy cavern."
—Hermes in The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Translated in Trickster Makes This World)
O to be a toothsome masterpiece
an irresistible piece of resistance
O to astonish the hungers of mankind
—James Broughton, Hermes My Master Chef
"We need the marvelous input of each other's minute-by-minute new discoveries, as each of us begins to explore this vast new universe…As ours are the first deliberate feet upon this pristine shore, there are no guide-posts as yet erected, nor maps to be found in bottles, nor even the prospectus of ancient visionary seers."
—Harry Hay, This new planet of Fairy-vision
"What may I say, my son? I can but tell thee this. Whene'er I see within myself the Simple Vision brought to birth out of God's mercy, I have passed through myself into a Body that can never die. And now I am not as I was before; but I am born in Mind."
—Hermes in The Corpus Hermeticum
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