GMillion

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure to not dishonor me.”

“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
― 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

“Until the moment I met you, I always seem to be caught between dreading the responsibility of someone else’s love and being resentful that I didn’t feel properly loved myself. Often both seemed to exist at the same time. With you it’s different. I can’t hear enough about your love for me. Yet still, in some way I’m holding back. it’s as though I can’t fully let go without causing an eruption of need, hunger, and desire of such overwhelming proportions that it would wipe me out entirely.”
― Nick Bantock, Alexandria: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Unfolds

“I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep?

The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: "What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?"

He'd smiled in the firelight. "That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe