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161 " Our mouths opened under each other, and the warmth of his sweetened throat poured into mine. I could not think, could not do anything but drink him in, each breath as it came, the soft movements of his lips. It was a miracle. "
― Madeline Miller , The Song of Achilles
162 " I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent if his doom. "
163 " There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to know what he had not said. "
164 " He is a mortal,” she says. “And mortals die.” “I am a mortal!” he screams. “What good is godhead, if it cannot do this? What good are you? "
165 " I have given enough to them. I will not give them this. "
166 " Pride became us—heroes were never modest. "
167 " What had Deidameia thought would happen, I wondered, when she had her women dance for me? Had she really thought I would not know him? 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. "
168 " And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again. "
169 " Do you think Aristos Achaion fights in hopeless wars? "
170 " He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart? "
171 " Name one hero who was happy. You can't. "
172 " We were like gods at the dawning of the world, and our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other. "
173 " His eyelids were the color of the dawn sky; he smelled like earth after rain. "
174 " Will I feel his ashes as they fall against mine? I think of the snowflakes on Pelion, cold on our red cheeks. The yearning for him is like hunger, hollowing me. Somewhere his soul waits, but it is nowhere I can reach. Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free. His ashes settle among mine, and I feel nothing. "
175 " My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet. "
176 " Even here, behind the darkness of my eyelids, I cannot name the thing I hope for. "
177 " The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods. "
178 " Patroclus,'' Achilles tilted his face up with a gentle finger under his chin. ''I would recognise you in total darkness, were you mute and I deaf. I would recognise you in another lifetime entirely, in different bodies, different times. And I would love you in all of this, until the very last star in the sky burnt out into oblivion''. "
179 " I could not make him a god," she says. Her jagged voice, rich with grief. /But you made him./ "
180 " Peleus acknowledged this. "Yet other boys will be envious that you have chosen such a one. What will you tell them?" "I will tell them nothing." The answer came with no hesitation, clear and crisp. "It is not for them to say what I will do. "