Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I can please you, I swear it. You will find none more loyal than me. I will do anything.” I do think he loved me a little. For before I could say the thousand humiliating things in my heart, all the proofs of passion I had hoarded, the crawling devotions I would do, I felt his power come around me. And with that same flick he had used upon the cushions, he sent me back to my rooms.”

— Madeline Miller

252. “All heroes are fools, he liked to say. What he meant was, all heroes but me.”

— Madeline Miller

253. “Odysseus drew the world to him,” she said. “Telegonus runs after, shaping as he goes, like a river carving a channel.”

— Madeline Miller

254. “That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. 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.”

— Madeline Miller

255. “His face was like a quiet pool that would hold everything safe in its depth.”

— Madeline Miller

256. “My divinity shines in me like the last days of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead, and can hold nothing in their hands.”

— Madeline Miller

257. “Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.”

— Madeline Miller

258. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

259. “He is such a flood, I thought.”

— Madeline Miller

260. “When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.”

— Madeline Miller

261. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

262. “He liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.”

— Madeline Miller

263. “The earth seemed to echo where I walked. Above me the sky stretched out its empty hands.”

— Madeline Miller

264. “I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced it as soldiers face their enemies, girded and braced, sword up against the coming blows. Yet all my preparations were not enough.”

— Madeline Miller

265. “I have no need to forgive you. You cannot offend me.”

— Madeline Miller

266. “Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature’s breath. Everything except for me.”

— Madeline Miller

267. “You cannot make that promise, I wanted to shout. You know nothing. But whose fault was that? I had kept the face of the world veiled from him. I had painted his history in bright, bold colors, and he had fallen in love with my art. And now it was too late to go back and change it. If I was so old, I should be wise. I should know better than to howl when the bird was already flown.”

— Madeline Miller

268. “But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”

— Madeline Miller

269. “There is this, too.” His hand was ceaseless now. “I know I have told you of this.” I closed my eyes. “Tell me again,” I said.”

— Madeline Miller

270. “They did not see me as their dinner. They were pious men, honestly lost, and I would feed them, and if there was a handsome one amongst them, I might take him to my bed. It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own.”

— Madeline Miller

271. “I did not lie dreaming of him during the days, I did not speak his name into my pillow. He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.”

— Madeline Miller

272. “I had been dreaming myself a fish, silvered by sun as it leapt from the sea. The waves dissolved, became amphorae and grain sacks again.”

— Madeline Miller

273. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

274. “Oh, tell her some of them! I think Circe would appreciate the witchcraft. What about the hundred girls who died while you heaved over them?”

— Madeline Miller

275. “Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest.”

— Madeline Miller

276. “I have given enough to them. I will not give them this.”

— Madeline Miller

277. “I clap my hands over my ears. The voices of the dead were said to have the power to make the living mad. I must not hear him speak.”

— Madeline Miller

278. “I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power.”

— Madeline Miller

279. “Her voice was matter-of-fact. Loyal, songs called her later. Faithful and true and prudent. Such passive, pale words for what she was.”

— Madeline Miller

280. “I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?”

— Madeline Miller

281. “You are wrong about witchcraft,” I told her. “It does not come from hate. I made my first spell for love of Glaucos.” I could hear her mink-voice as if she stood before me. Yet it was in defiance of our father, in defiance of all those who slighted you and would keep you from your desires.”

— Madeline Miller

282. “This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. 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

283. “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?”

— Madeline Miller

284. “Most gods and mortals have lives that are tied to nothing; they tangle and wend now here, now there, according to no set plan. But then there are those who wear their destinies like nooses, whose lives run straight as planks, however they try to twist. It is these that our prophets may see.”

— Madeline Miller

285. “Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.”

— Madeline Miller

286. “Who was he to be so patient, while I spilled my blood? I was a woman grown. I was a goddess, and his elder by a thousand generations. I did not need his pity, his attention, anything. “Well?” I would demand. “Why don’t you say something?” “I am listening,” he would answer. “You see?” I said, when I was finished with the tale. “Gods are ugly things.” “We are not our blood,” he answered. “A witch once told me that.”

— Madeline Miller

287. “I have aged. When I look in my polished bronze mirror, there are lines upon my face. I am thickened too and my skin has begun growing loose. I cut myself with my herbs and the scars stay. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am vain and dissatisfied. But I do not wish myself back. Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.”

— Madeline Miller

288. “He admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light.”

— Madeline Miller

289. “May I give you some advice? If you are truly his friend, you will help him leave this soft heart behind. He’s going to Troy to kill men, not rescue them.” His dark eyes held me like swift-running current. “He is a weapon, a killer. Do not forget it. You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.”

— Madeline Miller

290. “Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head.”

— Madeline Miller

291. “I did not mind the emptiness either. For a thousand years I had tried to fill the space between myself and my family.”

— Madeline Miller

292. “He was not so easy and even as he pretended. Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

294. “I will not sentence myself to such a living death.”

— Madeline Miller

295. “Our dead came for their vengeance regardless of witnesses.”

— Madeline Miller

296. “But he was like that column of water he had told me of once, cold and straight, sufficient to himself.”

— Madeline Miller

297. “In those days, my mother was in an especial ill humor. My father had begun to prefer his draughts to her, and her venom over it fell to me.”

— Madeline Miller

298. “I could feel his power reaching for my secrets. In the old days, I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been. I owed him nothing. He would have of me only what I wanted to give.”

— Madeline Miller

299. “Prince Achilles! Aristos Achaion! As.”

— Madeline Miller

300. “For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him to stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.”

— Madeline Miller