630 Quotes by Madeline Miller

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.

What had Deidameia thought would happen, I wondered, when she had her women dance for me? Had she really thought I would not know him? 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.

And you think that no one but me can kill Hector.''Yes.' I said.'And you think to steal time from the Fates?''Yes.''Ah.' A sly smile spread across his face; he had always loved defiance. 'Well, why should I kill him? He's done nothing to me.'For the first time then, I felt a kind of hope.

Achilles weeps. He craddles me, and will not eat, nor speak a word other than my name. I see his face as if through water, as a fish sees the sun. His tears fall, but I cannot wipe them away. This is my element now, the half-life of the unburied spirit.

He weeps as he lifts me into our bed. My corpse sags; it's warm in the tent, and the smell will come soon. He does not seem to care. He holds me all night long, pressing my cold hands to his mouth.

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 Phthia, blank and unseeing. He had never, not once, looked at me that way.

My fears forgotten in the golden harbour of his arms.

No one would remember his glory, or his honesty, or his beauty; all his gold would be turned to ashes and ruin.

I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind any more, that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty? It was enough to watch him win, to see the soles of his feet flashing as they kicked up sand, or the rise and fall of his shoulders as he pulled through the salt. It was enough.