Quotes from Madeline Miller

My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would... A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.

The ocean floor was sandy and soft as pillows. I settled into it and slept.

I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant's discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant. The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.

He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.

I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power.

Peleus acknowledged this. "Yet other boys will be envious that you have chosen such a one. What will you tell them?" "I will tell them nothing." The answer came with no hesitation, clear and crisp. "It is not for them to say what I will do.

I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

Strange that such a small kindness felt like grace.

He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight.

My consolation is that we will be together in the underworld. That we will meet again there, if not in this life. I would not wish to be there without her.

Too late, I thought. Too late for all the things I should have known. I had made so many mistakes that I could not find my way back through their tangle to the first one.

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

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. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such a power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

I looked at her, as vivid in my doorway as the moon in the autumn sky. Her eyes held mine, gray and steady. 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.

Then the best part of him died, and he was even more difficult after that. [...] "What was his best part?" "His lover, Patroclus. He didn't like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.

I wish he had let you all die

At first it is strange. I am used to keeping him from her, to hoarding him for myself. But the memories well up like springwater, faster than I can hold them back. They do not come as words, but like dreams, rising as scent from the rain-wet earth. This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.

Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods' pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.

He paused now, considering. I loved this about him. No matter how many times I had asked, he answered me as if it were the first time.

Do not listen to your enemy, Odysseus had once told me. Look at them. It will tell you everything.

A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.

Well? What do you have to say to me? You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.

Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new. I closed my eyes. Through the window I heard the bees singing in the garden. My lion's tail beat against the stones. An eternity later, when I opened my eyes, the shadows had not even moved.