Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread:.”

— Madeline Miller

102. “You are wise,’ he said. ‘If it is so,’ I said, ’it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

— Madeline Miller

103. “I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.”

— Madeline Miller

104. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

105. “All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.”

— Madeline Miller

106. “This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old.”

— Madeline Miller

107. “He was another knife I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.”

— Madeline Miller

108. “As for the goddess’s answer, I did not care. I would have no need of her. I did not plan to live after he was gone.”

— Madeline Miller

109. “An ugly man, with a face sharp like a weasel and a habit of running a flickering tongue over his lips before he speaks. But most ugly of all are his eyes: blue, bright blue. When people see them, they flinch. Such things are freakish. He is lucky he was not killed at birth.”

— Madeline Miller

110. “I stepped into those woods and my life began.”

— Madeline Miller

111. “It was like a great chain of fear, I thought. Zeus at the top and my father just behind. Then Zeus’ siblings and children, then my uncles, and on down through all the ranks of river-gods and brine-lords and Furies and Winds and Graces, until it came to the bottom where we sat, nymphs and mortals both, each eyeing the other.”

— Madeline Miller

112. “I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”

— Madeline Miller

113. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

114. “Afterwards, when Agamemnon would ask him when he would confront the prince of Troy, he would smile his most guileless, maddening smile. “What has Hector ever done to me?”

— Madeline Miller

115. “But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.”

— Madeline Miller

116. “Circe, he says, it will be all right. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean it does not hurt. He does not mean 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.”

— Madeline Miller

117. “Patroclus,′ he said. He was always better with words than I.”

— Madeline Miller

118. “But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

120. “No wonder I have been so slow, I thought. All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

122. “But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”

— Madeline Miller

123. “What has Hector ever done to me?”

— Madeline Miller

124. “You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?”

— Madeline Miller

125. “Circe,” Apollo said, and it was the greatest chime of all. Every melody in the world belonged to him.”

— Madeline Miller

126. “But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.”

— Madeline Miller

127. “The truth is, men make terrible pigs.”

— Madeline Miller

128. “When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.”

— Madeline Miller

129. “It was so simple. If you want it, I will do it. If it would make you happy, I will go with you. Is there a moment that a heart cracks? But a cracked heart was not enough, and I had grown wise enough to know it. I kissed him and left him there.”

— Madeline Miller

130. “The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered gleam of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.”

— Madeline Miller

131. “This was the cruelty of adults. Do you understand?”

— Madeline Miller

132. “Will you teach it to me?” “Sorcery cannot be taught. You find it yourself, or you do not.”

— Madeline Miller

133. “However gold he shines, do not forget his fire.”

— Madeline Miller

134. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

135. “Some had a whole epic, others just a verse.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

137. “Bring him back to me,′ he told them.”

— Madeline Miller

138. “Often those men in most need hate most to be grateful, and will strike at you just to feel whole again.”

— Madeline Miller

139. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

140. “Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.”

— Madeline Miller

141. “A surety rose in me, lodged in my throat. I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.”

— Madeline Miller

142. “They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power.”

— Madeline Miller

143. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

145. “Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart? O.”

— Madeline Miller

146. “I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread:.”

— Madeline Miller

147. “Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all.”

— Madeline Miller

148. “He weeps as he lifts me into our bed. My corpse sags; it’s warm in the tent, and the smell will come soon. He does not seem to care. He holds me all night long, pressing my cold hands to his mouth.”

— Madeline Miller

149. “Pride became us – heroes were never modest.”

— Madeline Miller

150. “He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.”

— Madeline Miller