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.

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

There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty.

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

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.