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- He believed the world’s natural order was to please him.
- The revulsion was plain on her face. Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, “You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.” My mother had been simpler: like savage bags of rotten flesh.
- Ouch that's not harsh at all
- When sculptors shape their stone, they shape it after him.
- But there was something in me that was sick of fear and awe, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me.
- I feel this, especially the 'allow me' part
- “It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient.
- “Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power. It is not enough to be an uncle’s favorite, to please some god in his bed. It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say, ‘I have been good, will you help me?’ they wrinkle their brows. Oh, sweetheart, it cannot be done. Oh, darling, you must learn to live with it. And have you asked Helios? You know I do nothing without his word.”
- “They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles. A thousand times I saw you squashed. I squashed you myself. And every time, I thought, that is it, she is done, she will cry herself into a stone, into some croaking bird, she will leave us and good riddance. Yet always you came back the next day. They were all surprised when you showed yourself a witch, but I knew it long ago. Despite your wet-mouse weeping, I saw how you would not be ground into the earth. You loathed them as I did. I think it is where our power comes from.”
- 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.
- “Let him be a hero. You are something else.” “And what is that?” In my mind I saw us already, our heads bent together over the purple flowers of aconite, the black roots of moly. I would rescue her from her tainted past. “A witch,” I said. “With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.”
- He was another knife, I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for.
- I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.
- “What was his best part?” “His lover, Patroclus. He didn’t like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.”
- Paris, the pretty wife-stealer.
- But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.
- I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward. I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.
dec 31 2019 ∞
dec 31 2019 +
dec 31 2019 +