Quotes from Madeline Miller

Achilles nodded and bent over the lyre. I did not have time to wonder about his intervention. His fingers touched the strings, and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once. A few hairs slipped forward to hang over his eyes as he played. They were fine as lure strings themselves, and shone.

Si uno te acechara, debes darle algo que desee más que a ti»,

An oath by the River Styx would hold even Zeus himself.

all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

She is constant. Constant in all things. Even wise men go astray sometimes, but never her. She is a fixed star, a true-made bow[...] Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.

I heard you were here." A clear voice like ice-melted streams.

Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities

You threw me to the crows, but i turns out I prefer them to you.

It was that moment, perhaps, that our lives changed. Not before in Scyros, nor before that still, on Pelion. But here, as we began to understand the grandness, now and always, that would follow him wherever he went. He had chosen to become a legend, and this was the beginning.

Soy Aquiles, hijo de Peleo, hijo de dioses, el mejor de los griegos. He venido a traeros la victoria.

Quirón había dicho en una ocasión que las naciones eran el invento más estúpido de los mortales.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets.

the never-ending ache of love and sorrow. perhaps in some other life i could have refused, could have torn my hair and screamed, made him face his choice alone. but not in this one. he would sail to troy and i would follow, even into death.

You are wise,' he said. 'If it is so,' I said, 'it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.

i did not care. i would have no need of her. i did not plan to live after he was gone.

I remembered how in all the stories of my childhood the women were always hanging themselves.

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 hummed a little and listened to the sound being swallowed by the air.

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.

Do not listen to your enemy...look at them. It will tell you everything.

was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

My ambivalence, of course, only encouraged him. Any challenge was a game, and any game a pleasure. If I had loved him, he would have been gone, yet my revulsion brought him back and back.

But a distaste rose in me now when I looked at him. One moment I would be laughing, and the next his jests turned sour in my throat.

Such patience mortals must have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour.