• Circe by Madeline Miller

--

• "It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two."
• "But my mind could imagine no further than that. I had never felt a lash. I did not know the colour of my blood."
• "'How do they bear it?' 'As best they can.'"
• "When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world."
• "The flowers hung lank around us, wan and fragile as moth wings."
• "This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh."
• "A look flashed in his eyes, like teeth in a wolf's mouth."
• "You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you."
• "Great gods smell fear like sharks smell blood, and they will devour you for it just the same."
• "But gods are born of ichor and nectar -- so they find their fame by proving what they can mar."
• "There was nothing it might ever have in the world but hatred and darkness and its teeth."
• "I felt myself a stranger to the world."
• "I had no right to claim him, I knew it. 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."
• "I wished then - oh, a dozen impossible things. That I had known sooner what she was. That we had grown up somewhere other than those glittering halls. I could have blunted her poisons, drawn her from her abuses, taught her how to gather the best herbs."
• "There was no answer, of course. Only the air, eating my words."
• "It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?"
• "Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before."
• "I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only if I stopped, if I lay down, did I feel it begin to bleed."
• "They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world."
• "Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep."
• "He never said, What if I go home, and all of it is ash? But I saw the thought in him, living like a second body, and feeding in the dark."
• "Those words, carried before him like a shield. Like country folk who will not say the god of death's name, for fear he will come and take their dearest heart."
• "-- you are right, this world is a wild and terrible place, and worth shouting at."
• "Odysseus, son of Laertes, the great traveller, prince of wiles and tricks and a thousand ways. He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none."
• "I was used to unhappiness, formless and opaque, stretching out to every horizon. But this had shores, depths, a purpose and a shape."
• "I loved his certainty, his world that was an easy place of right action divided sharply from wrong, of mistake and consequence, of monsters defeated. It was no world I knew, but I would live in it as long as he would let me."
• "The tonic of ordinary things."
• "-- she never went astray, never made an error. I had been jealous then. Now I thought: what a burden. What an ugly weight upon your back."
• "He was what the gods could use against me."
• "These gods, I thought. They always say the same thing."
• "He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive."
• "I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands."