Quotes from Madeline Miller

They will resent you. Worse, they will suspect you, for you are the daughter of a sorcerer and a witch in your own right. You have lived only in Colchis, you cannot know how pharmakeia is feared among mortals. They will seek to undermine you at every turn. It will not matter that you helped Jason. They will push that aside, or else use it against you as proof of your unnaturalness.

would miss them when they were gone, I knew. But I would find something else for him. I would help him forget. I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.

It seemed absurd even to think of it, foolish and improbable as a dream is by dinner.

To be utterly alone. What worse punishment could there be…

He was on his side, watching me. I had not heard him turn. I never hear him. He was utterly motionless, that stillness that was his alone. I breathed, and was aware of the bare stretch of dark pillow between us. He leaned forward. Our mouths opened under each other, and the warmth of his sweetened throat poured into mine. I could not think, could not do anything but drink him in, each breath as it came, the soft movements of his lips. It was a miracle.

The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through salt. It was enough.

Then he would leave for the underworld, where I could never go, for gods are the opposite of death. I tried to imagine those dusky hills and gray meadows, the shades moving slow and white among them. Some walked hand in hand with those they had loved in life; some waited, secure that one day their beloved would come. And for those who had not loved, whose lives had been filled with pain and horror, there was the black river Lethe, where one might drink and forget. Some consolation.

those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.

Above us, the constellations spun, and the moon paved her weary course.

he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

Will you be here? For I have never known such a wondrous thing in all my life as you." I had stood beside my father's light. I had held Aeetes in my arms, and my bed was heaped with thick-wooled blankets woven by immortal hands. But it was not until that moment that I think I had ever been warm.

Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned gray and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Telemachus the Just," I said. He smiled. "That's what they call you if you're so boring they can't think of something better.

Everyone knew how they dripped with perfume, were corrupt from soft living.

Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, "You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.

Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? [...] 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. Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow.

He was like a flame himself. He glittered, drew eyes. There was a glamour to him, even on waking, with his hair tousled and his face still muddled with sleep.

I was giddy feeling his first kicks and I spoke to him every moment, as I crushed my herbs, as I cut clothes for his body, wove his cradle out of rushes. I imagined him walking beside me, the child and boy and man that he would be.

With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a long time to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

I lay on the dirt, weeping. Those flowers had made him his true being, which was blue, and finned, and not mine. I thought I would die of such pain, which was not like the sinking numbness Aeëtes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest. But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

It is not fair," I said. "It cannot be." "Those are two different things," my grandmother said.