Mark Jay > Mark's Quotes

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“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, Circe

“He was another knife I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“How many of us would be granted pardon if our true hearts were known?”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Most men do not know me for what I am.”
“Most men in my experience are fools,” he said.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“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, Circe

“He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Yet you would dare to stay?"
"I dare anything," he said.
And that is how we came to be lovers.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I had begun to know what fear was. What could make a god afraid? I knew that answer too. A power greater than their own.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I never claimed to be good.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. "How would I know myself?”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation he was to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“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, Circe

“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.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“We gods eat as we sleep: because it is one of life’s great pleasures, not because we have to.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Imagine such a happiness. Like drinking wine your whole life, instead of water.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations? I balled up the letter and threw it in the trash.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”
― William Shakespeare, King Lear

“To each his own fear';”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

“One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

“Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle. And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

“It seemed to him that people must pass through each other’s lives all the time, touch them, be touched by them. Leave something behind, maybe, like a star that fell – you became a memory.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Children of Earth and Sky

“We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Children of Earth and Sky

“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“How we remember changes how we have lived.
Time runs both ways. We make stories of our lives.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“For to desire is better than to possess, the finality of the end was dreaded as deeply as it was desired.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love