Quotes from Madeline Miller

Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed

After, in the torchlight, he wondered at the marks on me, the red around my neck, and the purple on my arms and chest where he had gripped me. He rubbed at them, as though they were stains, not bruises. "The color is perfect," he said, "look." And he held up the mirror so I could see. "You make the rarest canvas, love.

A true-made bow, Odysseus had called her. A fixed star. A woman who knew herself. "I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.

For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him to stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

Will you come with me?' he asked. Perhaps in some other life I could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, and made him face his choice alone. But not in this one. He would sail to troy and I would follow, even into death.

I felt myself tremble, but I would not let him see it. Great gods smell fear like sharks smell blood, and they will devour you for it jus the same.

I had seen him in such moods. Every petty defect of the world enraged him, all the waste and stupidity and slowness of men, and all the irritants of nature too, biting flies and warping wood and the briars that ripped his cloak.

The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.

I did not see the worst of him. Even at his best he was not an easy man. But he was a friend to me in a time when I needed one." "It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends." "All creatures that are not mad need them.

The world was made of mysteries, and I was only another riddle among the millions.

His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore.

Tears came, and fell. Above us, the constellations spun, and the moon paced her weary course.

I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

I gaped at the cold shock of his beauty, deep-green eyes, features fine as a girl's. It struck from me a sudden, springing dislike. I had not changed so much, nor so well.

I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom.

Os encomiendo una misión para después de mi muerte: mezclar nuestras cenizas y enterrarnos juntos.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows?

We were silent a moment. 'So, which of the suitors would you have picked?' I shoved him, and he laughed

I could have stopped them," he said. The skin of his face was very pale; his voice was hoarse. "I was close enough. I could have saved her." I shook my head. "You could not have known." He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.

Some had a whole epic, others just a verse

I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

The hills and trees before me, the worms and lions, stones and tender buds, Daedalus' loom, all wavered as if they were a fraying dream. Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.

Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.