Maia

“He was watching me closely, reading my face over and over, like a priest searching the auguries for an answer. I could see the slight line in his forehead that meant utmost concentration.
Something shifted in me then, like the frozen surface of the Apidanos in spring. I had seen the way he looked at Deidameia; or rather the way he did not. It was the same way he had looked at the boys in Phtia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“That’s the strangest of all. I look down at his blood and know my death is coming. But in the dream I do not mind. What I feel, most of all, is relief.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Are you frightened?" I asked. The first call of a nightingale in the trees at our backs.
"No," he answered. "This is what I was born for.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine? I think of the snowflakes on Pelion, cold on our red cheeks. The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles