BOOK STARTERS VOL.56 CIRCE MADELINE MILLER
❛ But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. ❜
❛ He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none. ❜
❛ Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep. ❜
❛ It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment’s carelessness. ❜
❛ If I had ever believed it, I no longer do. ❜
❛ 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. ❜
❛ I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ❜
❛ I have a better idea. I will do as I please. ❜
❛ All my life has been murk and depths, but I am not a part of that dark water. I am a creature within it. ❜
❛ 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. ❜
❛ When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist. ❜
❛ But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. ❜
❛ I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. ❜
❛ This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive. ❜
❛ You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you. ❜
❛ Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me. ❜
❛ If now I am wise, it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes. ❜
❛ You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite. ❜
❛ Give me the blade. Some things are worth spilling blood for. ❜
❛ I have been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that is only a shape I’ve been poured into. I do not have to keep it. ❜
❛ I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. ❜
❛ Understanding the world is a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves. ❜
❛ Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two. ❜
❛ The truth is, men make terrible pigs. ❜
❛ My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it. ❜
❛ This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh. ❜
❛ Witches are not so delicate. ❜
❛ Those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats. ❜
❛ I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. ❜
