Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Later, Achilles pressed close for a final, drowsy whisper. ‘If you have to go, you know I will go with you.’ We slept.”

— Madeline Miller

152. “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?”

— Madeline Miller

153. “Exile might satisfy the anger of the living, but it did not appease the dead.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

155. “It was their favorite bitter joke: those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.”

— Madeline Miller

156. “Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest. I would give my life again to make it so.”

— Madeline Miller

157. “Tell me,” I said, “how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?” “I do not.” “Yet you would dare to stay?” “I dare anything,” he said. And that is how we came to be lovers.”

— Madeline Miller

158. “Patroclus. I have given enough to them. I will not give them this.” After that, there was nothing more to say.”

— Madeline Miller

159. “Whatever she tried, my spells would hold. Not even Odysseus could talk his way past witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.”

— Madeline Miller

160. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

161. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

162. “I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me.”

— Madeline Miller

163. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

164. “Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all. The sudden swoop of my stomach, the coursing anger. I was like a fish eyeing the hook.”

— Madeline Miller

165. “Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.”

— Madeline Miller

166. “I think: this is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: how long do we have?”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

168. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

169. “Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.”

— Madeline Miller

170. “You chose her,” he says. “Over me.” “Over your pride.” The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods.”

— Madeline Miller

171. “Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.”

— Madeline Miller

172. “I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.”

— Madeline Miller

173. “Penelope said, ‘What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?’ ‘I do not know for certain,’ I said. ‘I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.’ She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.”

— Madeline Miller

174. “With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. 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

175. “Then, child, make another.”

— Madeline Miller

176. “I have walked in the blackest deeps. You cannot guess what spells I have cast, what poisons I have gathered to protect myself against you, how your power may rebound upon your head. Who knows what is in me? Will you find out?”

— Madeline Miller

177. “When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.”

— Madeline Miller

178. “But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.”

— Madeline Miller

179. “There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

— Madeline Miller

180. “We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.”

— Madeline Miller

181. “It was spring, and we were surrounded by the profusion of Anatolian fertility. For three weeks the earth would paint herself in every color, burst every bud, unfurl each rioting petal. Then, the wild flush of her excitement spent, she would settle down to the steady work of summer. It was my favorite time of year.”

— Madeline Miller

182. “Amusement flashed in his eyes. I had fed off that look once, when I had been starving and thought such crumbs a feast.”

— Madeline Miller

183. “There was violence in that room, with so many princes and heroes and kings competing for a single prize, but we knew how to ape civilization.”

— Madeline Miller

184. “All those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.”

— Madeline Miller

185. “And you think to steal time from the Fates?” “Yes.” “Ah.” A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. “Well, why should I kill him? He’s done nothing to me.” For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.”

— Madeline Miller

186. “This is how I think of us, when I remember our nights at Troy: Achilles and I beside each other, Phoinix smiling and Automedon stuttering through the punch lines of jokes, and Briseis with her secret eyes and quick, spilling laughter.”

— Madeline Miller

187. “In making Achilles and Patroclus lovers, I wasn’t trying to speak for all gay men, just as when I write straight characters, I don’t claim to speak for all straight people. My job as an author is to give voice to these very particular characters – these two men, in this time, and in this place.”

— Madeline Miller

188. “They leaned towards him, like flowers to the sun, drinking in his luster. It was as Odysseus had said: he had light enough to make heroes of them all.”

— Madeline Miller

189. “It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.” “All creatures that are not mad need them.”

— Madeline Miller

190. “They will resent you. Worse, they will suspect you, for you are the daughter of a sorcerer and a witch in your own right. You have lived only in Colchis, you cannot know how pharmakeia is feared among mortals. They will seek to undermine you at every turn. It will not matter that you helped Jason. They will push that aside, or else use it against you as proof of your unnaturalness.”

— Madeline Miller

191. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

192. “Beautiful Scylla, dainty-doe Scylla, Scylla with her viper heart. Why had she done such a thing? It was not love, I had seen the sneer in her eyes when she spoke.”

— Madeline Miller

193. “I gaped at the cold shock of his beauty, deep-green eyes, features fine as a girl’s. It struck from me a sudden, springing dislike. I had not changed so much, nor so well.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

195. “You make the rarest canvas, love.”

— Madeline Miller

196. “Pharmakeia, such arts are called, for they deal in pharmaka, those herbs with the power to work changes upon the world, both those sprung from the blood of gods, as well as those which grow common upon the earth. It is a gift to be able to draw out their powers, and I am not alone in possessing.”

— Madeline Miller

197. “The never-ending ache of love and sorrow.”

— Madeline Miller

198. “There I discovered at last the limits of my power. However potent the mixture, however well woven the spell, the toad kept trying to fly, and the mouse to sting. Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.”

— Madeline Miller

199. “I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.”

— Madeline Miller

200. “His eyes were brown and warm as summer earth. His words were simple. They had no art to them, which of course was also art. He always knew how to show himself to best advantage.”

— Madeline Miller