Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“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 of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Should I tell you that when we're apart, your body comes back to me in dreams? That when I sleep, I see you, the dip of your waist, the freckle above your hip, and when I wake up in the morning, it feels like I've just been with you, the phantom touch of your hand on the back of my neck fresh and not imagined? That I can feel your skin against mine, and it makes every bone in my body ache? That, for a few moments, I can hold my breath and be back there with you, in a dream, in a thousand rooms, nowhere at all?”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“That's the choice. I love him, with all that, because of all that. On purpose. I love him on purpose.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“That is — your friend?"
"Philtatos," Achilles replied, sharply. Most beloved.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I thought, this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and I had better keep it a safe distance away from me. I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.
And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.
And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?
Sometimes, even now, I still can't.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
"Go," she says. "He waits for you."

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 of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Achilles was looking at me. “Your hair never quite lies flat, here.” He touched my head, just behind my ear. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you how I like it.”

My scalp prickled where his fingers had been. “You haven’t,” I said.

“I should have.” His hand drifted down to the vee at the base of my throat, drew softly across the pulse. “What about this? Have I told you what I think of this, just here?”

“No,” I said.

“This surely then.” His hand moved across the muscles of my chest; my skin warmed beneath it. “Have I told you of this?”

“That you have told me.” My breath caught a little as I spoke.

“And what of this?” His hand lingered over my hips, drew down the line of my thigh. “Have I spoken of it?”

“You have.”

“And this? Surely I would not have forgotten this.” His cat’s smile. “Tell me I did not.”

“You did not.”

“There is this too.” His hand was ceaseless now. “I know I have told you of this.”

I closed my eyes. “Tell me again,” I said.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Yes, here, this was his domain now, because they were in a dream and Gideon was a dreamer. He was an optimist, an idiot prince. He saw the possibility of doom and said not today, fucker!, flipping off the whims of fate while diving backward into hell.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“Most people would assume Gideon was a pessimist because hello, look at the obvious (everything fucking sucked) but actually he wasn’t, because he enjoyed being alive. He loved being awake. He missed being awake.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess. And you too. I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“So, imagine we’re all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there’s that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That’s the maximum depth of feeling you’ve ever experienced. And then, the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it’s all right because that thing will happen to me when I’m older and wiser, and I’ll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won’t seem so terrible.

“But it happens to you when you’re young. It happens when your brain isn’t even fully done cooking—when you’ve barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you’ll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn’t just stop at the bottom —it goes all the way down.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“Name one hero who was happy."
I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.
"I swear it," he echoed.
We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.
"I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“The moment you first called me a prick, my fate was sealed. O, fathers of my bloodline! O, ye kings of olde! Take this crown from me, bury me in my ancestral soil. If only you had known the mighty work of thine loins would be undone by a gay heir who likes it when American boys with chin dimples are mean to him.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I hate this so much. I know. But we’re gonna do it together. And we’re gonna make it work. You and me and history, remember? We’re just gonna fucking fight. Because you’re it, okay? I’m never gonna love anybody in the world like I love you. So, I promise you, one day we’ll be able to just be, and fuck everyone else.”
― Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue

“The day you are not a fire,” he said, “is the day the earth will fall still for me.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Knowledge is carnage. You can’t have it without sacrifice.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“we are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“Depending who viewed it, Persephone had either been stolen or she had run from Demeter. Either way, she made herself queen.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“We’re all starving, but not everyone is doing it correctly. Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic. It’s easy, so fucking easy to die, so the ones who make themselves something are the same ones who learn to starve correctly.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Olympus was empty. The gods were already here.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Paradox

“He smiled, and his face was like the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“They will not use my tears for their entertainment.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“I love you like all-fire.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“The moment our hearts shattered? It belongs to us.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“I know one thing, though: The Capitol can never take Lenore Dove from me again. They never really did in the first place. Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping, and she is the most precious thing I’ve ever known.
When I tell her that, she always says, “I love you like all-fire.”
And I reply, “I love you like all-fire, too.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“The snow may fall, but the sun also rises.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping