Achilles Quotes in Circe
The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. [Odysseus] shook his head. “How would I know myself?”
I was secretly glad. They suited him. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.
I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own […] His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing […] He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.
I looked down at my body […] 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 […] 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.
Achilles Quotes in Circe
The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. [Odysseus] shook his head. “How would I know myself?”
I was secretly glad. They suited him. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.
I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own […] His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing […] He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.
I looked down at my body […] 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 […] 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.