Girl on an Altar: Key Quotes

Girl on an Altar · Key Quotes

These are six exam-useful quotations from Marina Carr’s Girl on an Altar, chosen to cover sacrifice, guilt, power and grief. Learn the speaker and the act and scene for each one, and you can drop precise evidence into any Single Text answer.

The Announcement of the Sacrifice

Three words, spoken by the servant Cilissa, and they are the moment the play’s central horror becomes plain and unavoidable.

“She’s the sacrifice!”Cilissa, Act One, Scene Two

Cilissa is the character who watches the sacrifice at Aulis and has to put it into words for Clytemnestra, and this line captures how blunt that horror is once it lands. There is no elaborate justification here and no political argument, just a fact stated flat. Use this quotation when you need a short, sharp piece of evidence for the founding act of the tragedy, the moment power and ambition are bought with a child’s life.

Agamemnon’s Defence

This is Agamemnon’s excuse for the killing at Aulis, delivered as a figure of speech.

“My hands were tied.”Agamemnon, Act Two, Scene Two

His argument throughout the play is that he had no real choice, that the army was close to mutiny and would have deposed him if he had refused to sacrifice Iphigenia. Four words carry the whole shape of that self-justification, an abstract political necessity standing in for a decision he made about his own daughter. Quote this line alongside Clytemnestra’s rebuttal below to show an examiner how Carr sets up and then dismantles Agamemnon’s defence in the same breath.

The Rebuttal

Clytemnestra takes Agamemnon’s own phrase and turns it back on him, from a figure of speech into a literal fact about a body bound on an altar.

“Iphigenia’s hands were tied.”Clytemnestra, Act Two, Scene Two

Four words against his four words. This exchange is one of the most efficient pieces of argument in the whole play, and it is worth learning as a pair with the quotation above, because together they show exactly how Carr builds and then collapses Agamemnon’s case for himself. If you can only bring one exchange into an exam answer on this play, this is the one to bring.

The Admission

This is the moment Agamemnon finally says plainly what he has spent the whole play avoiding.

“Okay. I killed her.”Agamemnon, Act Two, Scene Four

It comes late, and it is grudging rather than remorseful, wrung out of him rather than offered freely. Notice how different this flat admission is from the political language he uses everywhere else in the play. Use this quotation to discuss Agamemnon’s character, particularly the gap between how he talks about the killing in the abstract and what he is finally forced to say about it directly.

Grief as Fury

This is Clytemnestra’s grief with the lid off.

“Your filthy hands. Your stinking, filthy, daughter-murdering hands.”Clytemnestra, Act Two, Scene Four

The repetition and the physical focus on his hands turn an abstract wrong into something visceral and immediate. It is worth contrasting this outburst with the calculated, patient Clytemnestra who spends most of the play watching and waiting, because this quotation shows you the feeling that all that patience has been holding down. Use it in any answer about grief, or about Clytemnestra’s character, to show that her eventual revenge is not cold calculation alone but grief that has finally found a way out.

The Family’s Cycle of Violence

Aegisthus places Agamemnon inside a family pattern rather than treating the killing of Iphigenia as an isolated act.

“Child killer. Like his father.”Aegisthus, Act Two, Scene One

The line reaches back a generation, tying Agamemnon to violence that came before him and that he is now repeating. Aegisthus has his own reasons to say this, given what happened to his own brothers at the hands of Agamemnon’s father, so the line is not neutral commentary, it is one insider of the family curse naming another. Use this quotation when you are writing about fate, inheritance, or the idea that the play’s violence repeats rather than resolves.

Girl on an Altar Key Quotes: Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Do not try to use all six quotations in a single answer. Pick two or three that fit the question directly, for example the tied-hands exchange for a question on power or blame, and the filthy hands line for a question on grief. Always name the speaker and place the line in its act and scene. That precision is worth more marks than a longer quotation you cannot place accurately.

Conclusion

These six lines cover the play’s whole emotional and argumentative range, from the flat horror of the sacrifice, through Agamemnon’s excuses and his eventual admission, to Clytemnestra’s fury and the family history that frames it all. Learn them with their speakers and their locations, and you will always have exact evidence ready, rather than a vague memory of what the play is about.