Circe

by Madeline Miller

You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.

All those years I had spent with them were like a stone tossed in a pool. Already, the ripples were gone.

Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.’

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.

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

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.