Circe

by Madeline Miller

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.

“She said that a man named Odysseus, born from my blood, will come one day to your island.” “And?” “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the worst prophecy I’ve ever heard,” I said. He sighed. “I know. I think I lost my cup.”

So I built the hollow likeness of a cow, with a place inside for her to sit. I gave it wheels, so we might roll it to the beach while the creature slept. I thought it would only be… I did not—” “Oh, please,” my sister spat. “The world will be ended before you stammer to your finish. I fucked the sacred bull, all right? Now get the thread.”

“Clever,” I said. “Minos claims it, and instead of being a cuckold he shares in my sister’s glory.

They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power.

It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say, ‘I have been good, will you help me?’ they wrinkle their brows. Oh, sweetheart, it cannot be done.

I had not fooled myself with false hope. I was a goddess, and he a mortal, and both of us were imprisoned. But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.

A golden cage is still a cage.

A man wants a wife like new grass, fresh and green.”

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

It did not matter even if they stayed for their whole lives, if she were the friend I had yearned for and he were something else, it would only be a blink. They would wither, and I would burn their bodies and watch my memories of them yellow and fade as everything faded in the endless wash of centuries, even Daedalus, even the blood-spatter of the Minotaur, even Scylla’s appetites. Even Telegonus.