It’s been a loooooooooooong time since I wrote a ‘favorite lines from…’ kind of post. I can’t think of a better one to start back up with than Madeline Miller’s CIRCE. Miller’s prose is simply magical. Every pun intended. Assume there will be spoilers below.

• When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.
• That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.
• Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we speak.
• What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.
• It was not a word I knew. It was not a word anyone knew, then. ‘Pharmakis,’ I said. Witch.
• I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.
• ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?’ ‘A happy one, of course.’ ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’

Fear of failure was the worst thing for any spell.

• My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch.
• This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practise and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.
• Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head.
• 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 he was to me.
• As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.
• When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy. …Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.
• Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.
• They never listened. The truth is, men make terrible pigs.
• War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they win from it, they will have only a handful of years to enjoy before they die. More likely they will perish trying.

Witches are not so delicate.

• Most men, in my experience, are fools.

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

• Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster? Those could not still be the only choices.
• When Achilles puts on his helmet and cleaves his red path through the field, the hearts of common men swell in their chests. They think of the stories that will be told, and they long to be in them. I fought beside Achilles. I stood shield to shield with Ajax. I felt the wind and fan of their great spears.
• I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.
• They have wrinkles, but no wisdom. I took  them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man. … I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth, but their age as well.
• Heroes are fools.

When you are in Egypt you worship Isis, when in Anatolia you kill a lamb for Cybele. It does not trespass on your Athena still at home.

• I washed him and rubbed oils into his skin, as carefully as if he could still feel my fingers. I sang as I worked, a melody to keep his soul company while he waited to cross the great river to the underworld.
• I touched the thought like a bruise, testing its ache.
• He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend I had none.
• I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open. I made a list of all the things I would do for him. Scald off my skin. Tear out my eyes. Walk my feet to bones, if only he would be happy and well.
• Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.
• Gods and mortals do not last together happily.
• Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.

‘…I cannot say how I knew. It was as if…as is all this while, my eyes had been waiting for just that shape.’ I knew the feeling. It is how I had felt first looking down at him in my arms.

• But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.
• ‘It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.’ ‘All creatures that are not mad need them.’

I remembered what Odysseus had said about her once. That 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.

• ‘I warned her once that grief would come of her marriage. There is no pleasure in hearing I was right.’ ‘There seldom is.’
• Penelope said, ‘What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?’ ‘I do not know for certain. …I have come to believe it is mostly will.’ She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.
• That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.

Life is not so simple as a loom. What you weave, you cannot unravel with a tug.

• …some people are like constellations who only touch the earth for a season.
• One of us must grieve. I would not let it be him.
• ‘You have always been the worst of my children,’ he said. ‘Be sure you do not dishonor me.’ ‘I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.’
• Do not try to take my regret from me.
• ‘We are not our blood,’ he answered. ‘A witch once told me that.’

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.