“I’m the villain, even in my own story. But you were supposed to play a different role. You were supposed to be my true love... you were supposed to be as obsessed with me as I am with you.”
― Finale
― Finale
“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― The Song of Achilles
― The Song of Achilles
“There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.”
― The Song of Achilles
― The Song of Achilles
“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― The Secret History
― The Secret History
“And perhaps you should get some new stories, so I don’t fucking kill myself of boredom.”
― The Song of Achilles
― The Song of Achilles
Silas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Silas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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