Mythological Fiction - Tumblr Posts

My favourite quote is the entire three page dialogue between Circe and Odysseus when they first meet 😙

My favourite quotes from Circe by Madeline Miller

However gold he shines, do not forget his fire.

When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

But when he turned to me, I felt the shock of that old love between us.

(..) Aeëtes’ face was calm, as if my father’s anger were only another thing in the room, a table, a stool.

I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.

For a hundred generations, I had walked the world drowsy and dull, idle and at my case. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who loved me a little did not care to stay. Then I learned that I could bend the word to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

If my childhood had given me anything, it was endurance.

Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

Well? What do you have to say to me? You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.

But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savour rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind. (..) I wanted to seize her by the shoulders. Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. I said nothing, and let her dance.

A golden cage is still a cage.

None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.

‘They are not like us.’ / ‘I am not like you.’

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.

It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own.

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.

When he was gone, would I be like Achilles, wailing over his lost lover Patroclus? I tried to picture myself running up and down the beaches, tearing at my hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul. I could not see it. That knowledge brought its own sort of pain. But perhaps that is how it was meant to be.

Two children he had had, and he could not see either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

All the things he had done in life must now stand as they were.

The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made of only himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.

Amusement flashed in his eyes. I had fed off that look once, when I was starving and thought such crumbs a feast.

He took my hand. The gesture was like a bard’s. But were we not in a sort of song? This was the refrain we had practiced so often.

I had been old and stern for so long, filled with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Circe, he says, it will be alright. It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. (..) I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. 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.

Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines like the last days of the sun before they drown in the sea. 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.

All my life, I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.