Circe

by Madeline Miller

‘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.’

‘A golden cage is still a cage.’

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

I had not wanted my history to be only an amusement, grist for his relentless intelligence.

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.