Top 500 Madeline Miller Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “There are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth.”

— Madeline Miller

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

313. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

316. “The world is an unjust place.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

318. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

321. “Less than a month we had spent together, yet he seemed to know me better than anyone who had ever walked the world.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

325. “He smiled at me, and I saw the lines where other smiles had been.”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

327. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “How long would I cling to that handful of minutes, trying to cover myself as if with some threadbare blanket?”

— Madeline Miller

342. “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

343. “She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence.”

— Madeline Miller

344. “That’s the stone,” I said, “like I told you. It can’t get warm without sun. Haven’t you ever touched a statue?”

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

346. “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

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

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

— Madeline Miller

350. “I never claimed to be good.”

— Madeline Miller