Quotes from Madeline Miller

I looked down at my body, bare in the fire's light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father's fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks. […] I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

And that's when I'm supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn, and see him poised over me like the sun, and make a little gasping noise of wonder and gratitude, and then he fucks me.

I fixed my gaze on his. "Try," I said. For a long moment he stared at me. Then he turned and twitched off through the brush. I tell you, for all my spells, that was the first time I truly felt myself a witch..

Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

If you have to go, you know I will go with you.

I let him hold me, let him press us length to length so close that nothing might fit between us.

Circe was the first word he ever spoke, and the second was sister.

I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.

Penelope said, 'What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?' 'I do not know for certain,' I said. 'I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.' She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.

He is half of my soul,

My chest trilled with something I could not quite name. Escape, and danger, and hope all at once.

It was dark, and there was only a little moon, which I took to mean that the goddess, if she existed, smiled on me.

And you think to steal time from the Fates?" "Yes." "Ah." A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. "Well, why should I kill him? He's done nothing to me." For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.

I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.

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.

I sat on the rocks and thought of the stories I knew of nymphs who wept until they turned into stones and crying birds, into dumb beasts and slender trees, thoughts barked up for eternity. I could not even do that, it seemed. My life closed me in like granite walls.

They will seek to undermine you at every turn.

In my chair by the hearth, I lifted my cup. "Sometimes," I told him, "you must be content with ignorance." He did not like that answer, yet that was the perversity of him: in a way he liked it best of all. I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.

There is this, too." His hand was ceaseless now. "I know I have told you of this." I closed my eyes. "Tell me again," I said.

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

You warned me it was not safe. I do not think being frightened will help.

I waited for someone to remark on my absence, but no one did, for no one had noticed. Why would they? I was nothing, a stone. One more nymph child among the thousand thousands.

Death's Brother is the name that poets give to sleep

I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.