Raphael Duncan

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“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, The Song of Achilles