Quotes from Madeline Miller

You have killed him and taken your vengeance. It is enough." "It will never be enough," he says. FOR THE FIRST TIME since my death, he falls into a fitful, trembling sleep. Achilles. I cannot bear to see you grieving. His limbs twitch and shudder. Give us both peace. Burn me and bury me. I will wait for you among the shades.

And perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don't fucking kill myself of boredom.

and when he moved it was like watching oil spread across a lake, smooth and fluid, almost vicious

Your wife sounds like a clever woman." "She is. 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.

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.

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child.

She moved like a wave herself, graceful, but with relentless, driving motion.

Our men liked conquest; they did not trust a man who was conquered himself.

Sorcery cannot be taught. You find it yourself, or you do not.

There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to know what he had not said.

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 if his doom.

Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. [...] I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

He is a mortal," she says. "And mortals die." "I am a mortal!" he screams. "What good is godhead, if it cannot do this? What good are you?

He liked such sharpness, for there was nothing in him that had any blood you might spill.

Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. 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 have given enough to them. I will not give them this.

He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?

Pride became us—heroes were never modest.

I would not be able to bear it, I thought. I would seize him, hold him to me. But I only embraced him a final time, pressing hard as if to set him into my skin. Then I watched him take his place among them, stand upon the prow, outlined against the sky. The light darted silver from the waves. I lifted my hand in blessing and gave my son to the world.

It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.

And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother's lyre. He had brought it with him. 'I wish I had known,' I said, the first day when he showed it to me. 'I almost did not come, because I did not want to believe it.' He smiled. 'Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.

Who was he if not destined for fame?