The Song of Achilles Quotes

“The presence of the other boys did not comfort me; our dead come for their vengeance regardless if witnesses.”

“Our goddess of the moon is gifted with magic, with power over the dead. She could banish the dreams, if she wished. She did not.”

“All I saw was his beauty, his singing limbs, the quick flickering of his feet.”

“Maybe her gods are kinder than ours, and she will find rest”

“An ugly man, with a face sharp like a weasel and a habit of running a flickering tongue over his lips before he speaks. But most ugly of all are his eyes: blue, bright blue. When people see them, they flinch. Such things are freakish. He is lucky he was not killed at birth.”

“We reached for each other and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake in this room loving him in silence.”

“This was a man who moved like the gods were watching: every gesture he made was upright and correct. There was no one else it could be but Hector”

“He did not fear ridicule, he had never known it.”

“Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother’s lyre. He had brought it with him. ‘I wish I had known,’ I said, the first day when he showed it to me.

‘I almost did not come, because I did not want to believe it.’ He smiled. ‘Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”

“This is how I think of us, when I remember our nights at Troy: Achilles and I beside each other, Phoinix smiling and Automedon stuttering through the punch lines of jokes, and Briseis with her secret eyes and quick, spilling laughter.”

“The rosy gleam of his lip, the fevered gleam of his eyes. There was not a line anywhere on his face, nothing creased or graying; all crisp. He was spring, golden and bright. Envious death would drink his blood, and grow young again.”

“He knew, but it was not enough. The sorrow was so large it threatened to tear through my skin. When he died, all things swift and beautiful and bright would be buried with him.”

“When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.”

“I saw then how I had changed. I did not mind anymore that I lost when we raced and I lost when we swam out to the rocks and I lost when we tossed spears or skipped stones. For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?”

“There was more to say, but for once we did not say it. There would be other times for speaking, tonight and tomorrow and all the days after that. He let go of my hand.”

“Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know is in dark or disguise, told myself. I would know it even in madness.”

“The thick warmth of his sleepy breath against my ear. If you have to go, I will go with you. My fears forgotten in the golden harbor of his arms. The memories come, and come. She listens, staring into the grain of the stone. We are all there, goddess and mortal and the boy who was both.”

“I conjure the boy I knew. Achilles, grinning as the figs blur in his hands. His green eyes laughing into mine. Catch, he says. Achilles, outlined against the sky, hanging from a branch over the river.”

“We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”