89 beautiful and evocative Circe quotes by Madeline Miller
Circe has been seriously underappreciated in Homer’s Odyssey. But let us rejoice, because she is no longer, thanks to Madeline Miller’s retelling.
I guess life is pretty peachy if you’re a powerful, immortal goddess-witch who inhabits a breathtaking island full of woods, beaches, mountains, magical herbs and flowers, with your main company being lions, wolves and pigs.
But this story is more than just a masterful modern retelling, with all of the above. What Miller has done is recast Circe from a minor character into a complex, layered and sympathetic being with a redemptive backstory.
The evocative pictures master literary craftswoman Miller paints with poignant words and memorable Circe quotes, whether from the protagonist herself or the supporting array of colourful characters we get to meet and know is spellbinding. Moreover, the gateways into Homeric myth do justice to the original, while giving Circe her own voice.
Circe quotes with page numbers
Indeed, it’d be heathen of me not to have documented the powerful wisdom, haunting thoughts, metaphysical dilemmas, and soul-tugging reflections. Additionally, there are the words that make you say, “What a chauvinistic pig!” “What a misogynist,” plus the wise, sometimes feminist musings.
Nonetheless, the most memorable quotes in Circe are enchanting, varied and peppered throughout the entire book. So I added page numbers, so, uh, we’re all on the same page. Here are a few enchanting and thought-provoking quotes that may give you a few feels, split out by theme.
Circe origins and character growth
“When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist.” - Circe | Page 1, Chapter 1
“It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two” - Circe | Page 13, Chapter 2
“The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.” - Circe Page 19, Chapter 2
“I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” - Circe | Page 70, Chapter 7
What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know. - Circe | Page 56, Chapter 6
“Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.” - Circe | Page 74, Chapter 7
“That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would. There was fear in that knowledge, but after my long night of terrors it felt small and inconsequential. The worst of my cowardice has been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark.” - Circe, Page 70, Chapter 7
“My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch.” - Circe | Page 111, Chapter 10
“But there was no wound she could give me that I had not already given myself.” - Circe | Page 105, Chapter 10
“It is funny,” she said, “that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father’s halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.” - Pasiphae | Page 126, Chapter 11
“Amusement flashed in his eyes. I had fed off that look once, when I had been starving and thought such crumbs a feast.” - Circe | Page 298, Chapter 23
“It's not fair," I said. "It cannot be." "Those are two different things," my grandmother said.” - Circe & Tethys | Page 38, Chapter 4
“You threw me to the crows, but it turns out I prefer them to you.” - Circe | Page 77, Chapter 7
“When the first crew had come, I had been a desperate thing, ready to fawn on anyone who smiled at me. Now I was a fell witch, proving my power with sty after sty. It reminded me suddenly of those old tests Hermes used to set me. Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster? Those could not still be the only choices.” - Circe | Page 182, Chapter 16
“‘When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy.’” The purple bruise at my throat was turning green at its edges. I pressed it, felt the splintered ache. Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.” - Daedalus & Circe | Page 168, Chapter 15
“No, I thought. It is too late for that. I have been found. Let them see what I am. Let them learn the world is not as they think.” - Circe | Page 169, Chapter 25
“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.” - Circe | Page 323, Chapter 25
“‘They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles. A thousand times I saw you squashed. I squashed you myself. And every time, I thought, that is it, she is done, she will cry herself into a stone, into some croaking bird, she will leave us and good riddance. Yet always you came back the next day. They were all surprised when you showed yourself a witch, but I knew it long ago. Despite your wet-mouse weeping, I saw how you would not be ground into the earth. You loathed them as I did. I think it is where our power comes from.’” - Pasiphae | Page 127, Chapter 11
“Such were my years then. I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I’m afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.” - Circe | Page 9, Chapter 1
“I could feel his power reaching for my secrets. In the old days, I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been. I owed him nothing. He would have of me only what I wanted to give.” - Circe | Page 83, Chapter 8
“You are wise,” he said. “If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.” - Telemachus & Circe | Page 324, Chapter 25
“‘Wil you bear my child?’ he asked me. I laughed at him. ‘No, never and never.’ - Hermes & Circe | Page 83, Chapter 8
“I remembered what Odysseus had said about her once. That she never went astray, never made an error. I had been jealous then. Now I thought: what a burden. What an ugly weight upon your back.” - Circe | Page 286, Chapter 22
“‘You dare to threaten me?’ These gods, I thought. They always say the same thing. ‘I do.’” - Helios & Circe | Page 312, Chapter 25
Gods mortality and immortality“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.” - Circe | Page 13, Chapter 2
“Not every god need be the same.” - Prometheus | Page 18, Chapter 2
“He liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.” - Circe | Page 4, Chapter 1.
“I loved his face in those moments, glowing with power and joy. My chest swelled with his. I longed to tell him that it was I who had given him such a gift but I saw how it pleased him to believe his godhead wholly his own and I did not want to take that from him.” - Circe | Page 43, Chapter 5
“Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.” - Circe | Page 90, Chapter 9
“That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.” - Circe | Page 37, Chapter 4
“But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.” - Circe | Page 47, Chapter 5
“This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.” - Circe | Page 117, Chapter 10
“Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, Prometheus had told me, the story they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in my life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.” - Circe | Page 138, Chapter 12
“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.” - Circe | Page 333, Chapter 27
“‘Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?’ It was a child’s question, but he nodded gravely. “There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?” “I know it,” I said. “But I do not understand.” “No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.” A chill shivered across my skin. “How do they bear it?” “As best they can.” - Prometheus & Circe | Page 17, Chapter 2
“‘Gods and mortals do not last together happily.’” - Circe | Page 229, Chapter 19
“I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. 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.” - Circe | Page 333, Chapter 27
“‘War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they win from it, they will have only a handful of years to enjoy before they die. More likely they will perish trying.’” - Odysseus | Page 175, Chapter 15
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?’ ‘A happy one, of course.’ ‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’ - Hermes & Circe | Page 84, Chapter 8
“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.” - Circe | Page 312, Chapter 25
“Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days.” - Circe | Page 199, Chapter 17
Feminism and sexism
“It was like a great chain of fear, I thought. Zeus at the top and my father just behind. Then Zeus’s siblings and children, then my uncles, and on down through the ranks of river-gods and brine-lords and Furies and Winds and Graces, until it came to the bottom where we sat, nymphs and mortals both, each eyeing the other.” - Circe | Page 26, Chapter 3
“‘Even the most beautiful nymph is largely useless, and an ugly one would be nothing, less than nothing. She would never marry or produce children. She would be a burden to her family, a stain upon the face of the world. She would live in the shadows, scorned and reviled. But a monster,” he said, “she always has a place. She may have all the glory her teeth can snatch. She will not be loved for it, but she will not be constrained either. So whatever foolish sorrow you harbor, forget it. I think it may be said that you improved her.’” - Aeëtes | Page 61, Chapter 6
“I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.” - Circe | Page 170, Chapter 15
“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.” - Circe | Page 181, Chapter 16
In his mind, he was already telling the tale to his court, to his wide-eyed nobles and fainting maidens. He did not thank Medea for her aid; he scarcely looked at her. As if a demi-goddess saving him at every turn was only his due.” - Circe | Page 145, Chapter 13
“The truth is, men make terrible pigs.” - Circe | Page 172, Chapter 15
“As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.” - Circe | Page 165, Chapter 14
“Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless fest laid upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.” - Circe | Page 171, Chapter 25
“Her words were falling on my head like a great cataract. I could scarcely take them in. She hated our family? She had always seemed to me their distillation, a glittering monument to our blood’s vain cruelty. Yet it was true what she said: nymphs were allowed to work only through the power of others. They could expect none for themselves.” - Circe | Page 127, Chapter 11
“I looked down at my body, bare in the fire’s light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father’s fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks. There would be no salutes. What had Aeëtes called an ugly nymph? A stain upon the face of the world.” - Circe | Page 189, Chapter 26
“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 did.” - Circe | Page 274, Chapter 21
“Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.” - Circe | Page 171, Chapter 15
“We laughed over all of it and when he left, I knew he told stories about me in turn: my dirt-black fingernails, my musky lion, the pigs that had begun coming to my door, truffling for slops and a scratch on the back. And, of course, how I had thrown myself upon him as a blushing virgin. Well? I had not blushed, but all the rest was true enough.” - Circe | Page 84, Chapter 8
Loneliness, love and friendship
“I waited for someone to remark on my absence, but no one did, for no one had noticed. Why would they? I was nothing, a stone. One more nymph child among the thousand thousands.” - Circe | Page 18, Chapter 2
“It was large enough to hold a dozen goddesses, and indeed I kept expecting to find nymphs and cousins around every turn. But no, that was part of my exile. To be utterly alone. What worse punishment could there be, my family thought, than to be deprived of their divine presence?” - Circe | Page 68, Chapter 7
“I had no right to claim him, I know it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.” - Circe | Page 132, Chapter 11
“I had stood beside my father's light. I had held Aeëtes in my arms, and my bed was heaped with thick-wooled blankets woven by immortal hands. But it was not until that moment that I think I had ever been warm.” - Circe | Page 32, Chapter 4
“He showed me his scars, and in return he let me pretend that I had none.” - Circe | Page 207, Chapter 27
“If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.” - Circe | Page 170, Chapter 25
“‘It is strange to think of a goddess needing friends.’ ‘All creatures that are not mad need them.’” - Telemachus & Circe | Page 280, Chapter 22
Witchery, sorcery and power
It was not a word I knew. It was not a word anyone knew, then. ‘Pharmakis,’ I said. Witch.” Circe | Page 58, Chapter 6
“If the world contained that power you allege, do you think it would fall to such as you to discover it?’” - Helios | Page 68, Chapter 6
“I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.” - Circe | Page 73, Chapter 7
“Sorcery cannot be taught. You find it yourself, or you do not.” - Aeëtes | Page 59, Chapter 6
I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay. Then 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. - Circe | Page 73, Chapter 7
“Witches are not so delicate,” I said. - Circe | Page 177, Chapter 15
“Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung.” - Circe | Page 72, Chapter 7
“Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.” - Circe | Page 73, Chapter 7
“I have walked in the blackest deeps. You cannot guess what spells I have cast, what poisons I have gathered to protect myself against you, how your power may rebound upon your head. Who knows what is in me? Will you find out?” - Circe | Page 312, Chapter 25
“Penelope said, ‘What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?’ ‘I do not know for certain. …I have come to believe it is mostly will.’ She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.” - Penelope & Circe | Page 293, Chapter 23
Wisdom
“A golden cage is still a cage.” - Daedalus | Page 124, Chapter 11
“We are not our blood…. A witch once told me that.” - Telemachus | Page 325, Chapter 26
“I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep? The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: "What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?" He'd smiled in the firelight. "That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.” Circe & Odysseus | Page 238, Chapter 19
“Most men do not know me for what I am.” “Most men in my experience are fools,” he said.” - Circe & Odysseus | Page 177, Chapter 15
“You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.” - Circe | Page 85, Chapter 8
“It was their favorite bitter joke: those who fight against prophecy only draw it more tightly around their throats.” - Circe | Page 254, Chapter 21
“Your wife sounds like a clever woman." "She is. I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.” - Circe & Odysseus | Page 174, Chapter 15
“I asked her how she did it once, how she understood the world so clearly. She told me that it was a matter of keeping very still and showing no emotions, leaving room for others to reveal themselves.” - Circe | Page 265, Chapter 21
“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. ‘Then, child, make another.’” - Circe & Trygon | Page 247 | Chapter 20
Parents and their children
“Sweet son," I said "you are right, this world is a wild and terrible place, and worth shouting at. But you are safe now, and all of us need to sleep. Will you let us have a little peace?” - Odysseus | Page 197, Chapter 16
“‘I am no child to him. I was his to dispose of, like his seed-warriors or his fire-breathing bulls. Like my mother, whom he dispatched as soon as she bore him an heir. Perhaps it might have been different if I’d had no witchcraft. But by the time I was ten I could tame adders from their nests, I could kill lambs with a word and bring them back with another. He punished me for it. He said it made me unmarketable, but in truth, he did not want me taking his secrets to my husband.’” - Medea | Page 148, Chapter 13
“I would not be able to bear it, I thought. I would seize him, hold him to me. But I only embraced him a final time, pressing hard as if to set him into my skin. Then I watched him take his place among them, stand upon the prow, outlined against the sky. The light darted silver from the waves. I lifted my hand in blessing and gave my son to the world.” - Circe | Page 309, Chapter, 24
“But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.” - Circe | Page 271, Chapter 21
“I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open. I made a list of all the things I would do for him. Scald off my skin. Tear out my eyes. Walk my feet to bones, if only he would be happy and well.” - Circe | Page 213, Chapter 18
‘You have always been the worst of my children,’ he said. ‘Be sure you do not dishonor me.’ ‘I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.’ - Helios & Circe | Page 313, Chapter 25
“Children are not sacks of grain, to be substituted one for the other.” - Circe | Page 220, Chapter 19
Miscellaneous favourites
“‘Imagine such a happiness. Like drinking wine your whole life, instead of water. Like having Achilles to run your errands.’” - Odysseus | Page 184, Chapter 16
“Ariadne’s light feet crossed and recrossed the circle. Every step was perfect, like a gift she gave herself, and she smiled, receiving it. I wanted to seize her by the shoulders. Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. I said nothing, and let her dance.” - Circe | Page 118, Chapter 10
What’s your favourite?
If you reached the end of this compilation, we hope you feel inspired and reminded that we all have the power to shape our own lives and destinies and that it is important to resist the societal pressures that try to constrain or limit us, whether it’s sexism, racism, ableism, or something else ridiculous that should not exist in human society.
Similarly, these quotes from Circe by Madeline Miller highlight the strength in being true to ourselves and embracing our uniqueness, no matter how unconventional.
