Quotes from Madeline Miller

I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores.

He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration. Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. 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.

He would patch their ships and I would cast charms against biting flies and fevers and we would take pleasure in the simple mending of the world.

I forget about the god, why I have fallen, why my feet stick in the same crevices I have already climbed. Perhaps this is all I do, I think, demented -- climb walls and fall from them. And this time when I look up, the god is not smiling.

He was no storyteller, as he had said, but that made it more enjoyable somehow, watching his serious face as he described flying horses and golden apples.

The flowers, when they saw me, seemed to press forward like eager puppies, leaping and clamouring for my touch. I felt almost shy of them, but day by day I grew bolder, and at last I knelt in the damp earth before a clump of hellebore.

His innocence could still frighten me.

The bed felt cold without him, and too large. I heard no sounds, and the stillness frightened me. It is like a tomb. I rose and rubbed my limbs, slapped them awake, trying to ward of a rising hysteria. This is what it will be, every day, without him. I felt a wild-eyed tightness in my chest, like a scream. Every day, without him.

there was something in me that was sick of fear and aw, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me

Tell me," I said, "how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?" "I do not." "Yet you would dare to stay?" "I dare anything," he said. And that is how we came to be lovers.

I came for her, but there was no one who would come for me. The thought was steadying. After all, I had been alone my whole life.

And perhaps, it is the greatest grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone Do you think? Perhaps, Achilles admitted

Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

Name one hero who was happy. You can't.' 'I can't.' 'I know. They never let you be famous and happy. I'll tell you a secret.' 'Tell me.' 'I'm going to be the first. Swear it.' 'Why me?' 'Because you're the reason.

But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another... We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you... We are men only. A brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.

Our goddess of the moon is gifted with magic, with power over the dead. She could banish the dreams, if she wished. She did not.

It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke.

The never-ending ache of love and sorrow. 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. Yes, I whispered. Yes.

I have long wondered something," I said. 'When we fought over Athena, how did you know to kneel to me? That it would shame me?' "Ah, it was a guess. something Odysseus said about you once." 'Which was?' "That the had never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less.

A marriage for love, rare as cedars from the East.

you may have what girls you like in the field, but you will bring none home, for only I will hold sway in your halls.

I believed that she would rather set the world on fire than lose.

They gave her to a mortal, trying to shackle the child's power. Dilute him with humanity, diminish him.

Do you always make beautiful things for those you are angry with?