The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.