Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Imagine such a happiness. Like drinking wine your whole life, instead of water. Like having Achilles to run your errands.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

304. “The world is an unjust place.”

— Madeline Miller

305. “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

306. “You will pardon me if I do not rejoice at being one in a long line of villains.”

— Madeline Miller

307. “I can smell him. The oils that he uses on his feet, pomegranate and sandalwood; the salt of clean sweat; the hyacinths we had walked through, their scent crushed against our ankles. Beneath it all is his own smell, the one I go to sleep with, the one I wake up to.”

— Madeline Miller

308. “What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.”

— Madeline Miller

309. “Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not.”

— Madeline Miller

310. “Our goddess of the moon is gifted with magic, with power over the dead. She could banish the dreams, if she wished. She did not.”

— Madeline Miller

311. “Their whispers choked me, turned the food in my mouth to ash. I pushed away my plate and sought out corners and spare halls where I might sit undisturbed, except for the occasional passing servant. My narrow world narrowed further: to the cracks in the floor, the carved whorls in the stone walls. They rasped softly as I traced them with my fingertip.”

— Madeline Miller

312. “The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. “How would I know myself?”

— Madeline Miller

313. “She thought that she had power to drive a wedge between us, but she had nothing.”

— Madeline Miller

314. “A pain was gnawing in my chest. I pressed my hands to it, the hollows and hard bones. I sat before my loom and felt at last like the creature Medea had named me: old and abandoned and alone, spiritless and gray as the rocks themselves.”

— Madeline Miller

315. “The words slid into me, smooth as a polished knife.”

— Madeline Miller

316. “The flowers, when they saw me, seemed to press forward like eager puppies, leaping and clamouring for my touch. I felt almost shy of them, but day by day I grew bolder, and at last I knelt in the damp earth before a clump of hellebore.”

— Madeline Miller

317. “Do you think Aristos Achaion fights in hopeless wars?”

— Madeline Miller

318. “Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.”

— Madeline Miller

319. “It was easy, in those moments, to forget that the war had not yet really begun.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

321. “Is it not our human tragedy that some men must be beaten like donkeys before they will see reason?”

— Madeline Miller

322. “Everyone knew how they dripped with perfume, were corrupt from soft living.”

— Madeline Miller

323. “A marriage for love, rare as cedars from the East.”

— Madeline Miller

324. “I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself.”

— Madeline Miller

325. “I never claimed to be good.”

— Madeline Miller

326. “I had the impulse to look over my shoulder, to make sure he was not striding across the sky already, his gilded arrow pointed at my heart. But there was something in me that was sick of fear and awe, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me. ‘Come in,’ I said, and led him through my door.”

— Madeline Miller

327. “Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs.”

— Madeline Miller

328. “I remembered what Odysseus had said about her once. That she never went astray, never made an error. I had been jealous then. Now I thought: what a burden. What an ugly weight upon your back.”

— Madeline Miller

329. “The air had a stinging weight like ocean waves. I felt myself a stranger to the world.”

— Madeline Miller

330. “You can,” I said. “But you have always been cautious, Father. You know I have stood against Athena. 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

331. “Yet Hector eludes him, weaving through the chariots and men with the luck of the gods. No one calls it cowardice that he runs. He will not live if he is caught. He is wearing Achilles’ own armor, the unmistakable phoenix breastplate taken from beside my corpse. The men stare as the two pass; it looks, almost, as if Achilles is chasing himself.”

— Madeline Miller

332. “Then he would leave for the underworld, where I could never go, for gods are the opposite of death. I tried to imagine those dusky hills and gray meadows, the shades moving slow and white among them. Some walked hand in hand with those they had loved in life; some waited, secure that one day their beloved would come. And for those who had not loved, whose lives had been filled with pain and horror, there was the black river Lethe, where one might drink and forget. Some consolation.”

— Madeline Miller

333. “Who was he if not destined for fame?”

— Madeline Miller

334. “I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.”

— Madeline Miller

335. “Strange that such a small kindness felt like grace.”

— Madeline Miller

336. “I learned to sleep during the day so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. 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

337. “My ambivalence, of course, only encouraged him. Any challenge was a game, and any game a pleasure. If I had loved him, he would have been gone, yet my revulsion brought him back and back. He.”

— Madeline Miller

338. “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

339. “This was how I came to be ten, and an orphan. This is how I came to Phthia.”

— Madeline Miller

340. “Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

— Madeline Miller

341. “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.”

— Madeline Miller

342. “I did not see the worst of him. Even at his best he was not an easy man. But he was a friend to me in a time when I needed one.” “It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.” “All creatures that are not mad need them.”

— Madeline Miller

343. “It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke.”

— Madeline Miller

344. “He was one of the greatest of our kind, and the drops that fell from him were golden, smearing his back with a terrible beauty.”

— Madeline Miller

345. “But when I tried to speak them, I found I could not. His cheeks were flushed with shame, and the skin beneath his eyes was weary. His trust was a part of him, as much as his hands or his miraculous feet. And despite my hurt, I would not wish to see it gone, to see him as uneasy and fearful as the rest of us, for any price.”

— Madeline Miller

346. “Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.”

— Madeline Miller

347. “My hands were cut almost to blood by jagged shards of rock. My feet left stains where they stepped. The pain was welcome, ordinary and clean. So easy to bear it was laughable.”

— Madeline Miller

348. “The look that passed over her face. Like a comet indeed, when it veers to earth and turns the fields to ash.”

— Madeline Miller

349. “I could have told him more, of the dreams that left me bleary and bloodshot, the almost-screams that scraped my throat as I swallowed them down. The way the stars turned and turned through the night above my unsleeping eyes.”

— Madeline Miller

350. “Not every god need be the same, he said.”

— Madeline Miller