Sal

“I felt the currents move. The grains of sand whispered against each other. His wings were lifting. The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“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

“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