Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul.”

— Madeline Miller

252. “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

253. “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

254. “Some things are worth spilling blood for.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

256. “He is such a flood, I thought.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

278. “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

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. “I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me. If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

283. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

285. “Divine blood flows differently in each god-born child. Orpheus’ voice made the trees weep, Heracles could kill a man by clapping him on the back. Achilles’ miracle was his speed.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

287. “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

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

— 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. “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

291. “The beach ebbed and flowed, its curves changing with every winter season. Even the cliffs were different, carved by the rain and wind, by the claws of countless scrabbling lizards, by the seeds that stuck and sprouted in their cracks. Everything was united by the steady rise and fall of nature’s breath. Everything except for me.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

293. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

296. “Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.”

— Madeline Miller

297. “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

298. “In the silence, I can hear Phoinix’s breaths, labored with the exertion of speaking so long. I do not dare to speak or move; I am afraid that someone will see the thought that is plain on my face. It was not honor that made Meleager fight, or his friends, or victory, or revenge, or even his own life. It was Cleopatra, on her knees before him, her face streaked with tears. Here is Phoinix’s craft: Cleopatra, Patroclus. Her name built from the same pieces as mine, only reversed.”

— Madeline Miller

299. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

300. “But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another... We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory. Who knows? Perhaps one day I will be famous. Perhaps more famous than you... We are men only. A brief flare of the torch. Those to come may raise us or lower us as they please.”

— Madeline Miller