Quotes from Madeline Miller

Children are not sacks of grain, to be substituted one for the other.

Death's Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days.

You make the rarest canvas, love

I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep? The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: "What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?" He'd smiled in the firelight. "That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.

Name one hero who was happy. You can't.

We bear it as best we can,

When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy." The purple bruise at my throat was turning green at its edges. I pressed it, felt the splintered ache. Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.

Do you think Aristos Achaion fights in hopeless wars?

Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine? I think of the snowflakes on Pelion, cold on our red cheeks. The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.

Is it not our human tragedy that some men must be beaten like donkeys before they will see reason?

Odysseus, son of Laertes, the great traveller, prince of wiles and tricks and a thousand ways. He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.

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 he was to me.

His eyelids were the color of the dawn sky; he smelled like earth after rain.

Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.

The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods.

Wealth and reputation were the things our people had always killed for.

My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet.

Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.

This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

The world is an ugly place. We must live in it.

Have you no more memories?' I am made of memories. The memories come, and come. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.