Achilles Quotes

Sing, goddess, of Achilles' ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans,
And cast the souls of many stalwart heroes
To Hades, and their bodies to the dogs
And birds of prey. ~ Homer

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. ~ Madeline Miller

Our dependence on foreign energy sources is our Achilles heel, not just in the realm of diplomacy, but in terms of our future as the world's economic leader. ~ Judy Biggert

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?

That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star…

Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble.

I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluste ~ Donna Tartt

Hopefully you'll grow old enough to realize that Achilles was a gorydamn fool. And we're fools all the more for not realizing he wasn't Homer's hero. He was warning. ~ Pierce Brown

Ah, Lyon: the Achilles' heel of this family. She had forgotten about Lyon, and about disappearing Redmonds. ~ Julie Anne Long

Growth is the mantra of our society because the economy can't remain healthy without growth.Impregnable monopolies aside (and these are few), profits are both the hallmark of capitalism and its Achilles heel, for no business can permanently maintain its prices much above its costs. There is only one way in which profits can be perpetuated; a business-or an entire economy-must grow. ~ Robert Heilbroner

Have a courage to repulse those people who dare to affront you because everyone has an Achilles' heel. Outshine them, and let your light shine on their damned faces, INTENSELY. ~ Maverick

As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers. ~ Pat Barker

As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory, or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. ~ Daniel Quinn

Annabeth frowned. "That doesn't make sense. But why were you visiting
" Her eyes widened. "Hermes said you bear the curse of Achilles. Hestia said the same thing. Did you ... did you bathe in the River Styx?"
"Don't change the subject."
"Percy! Did you or not?"
"Um ... maybe a little. ~ Rick Riordan

As for the goddess's answer, I did not care. I would have no need of her. I did not plan to live after he was gone. ~ Madeline Miller

I'm not known as a singer, but in life I like to do things that are a bit beyond my reach to keep myself from slipping. I find that technology has made it so that we don't need to have a memory system, and as I get older I want to do things that challenge me. What could be more challenging than doing this show with a knee that's been replaced, after tearing my Achilles heel with a baker's cyst on the back of my knee? And then I have to try and dance! ~ George Hamilton

I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This, and this, and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender, or too slow. This and this and this! I taught him how to skip stones, and he taught me how to carve wood. I could feel every nerve in my body, every brush of air against my skin. ~ Madeline Miller

It's all about how bad you want to come back. (The Achilles' is) not tight anymore. I'm like a wild dog about getting back on the field. I'm hungrier than I've ever been. ~ Takeo Spikes

Besides," said Suriyawong. "This was not a rescue operation."
"What was it, target practice? Chinese skeet?"
"An offer of transportation to an invited guest of the Hegemon," said Suriyawong. "And the loan of a knife."
Achilles held up the bloody thing, dangling it from the point. "Yours?" he asked.
"Unless you want to clean it," said Suriyawong.
Achillese handed it to him. Suriyawong took out his cleaning kit and wiped down the blade, then began to polish it.
"You wanted me to die," said Achilles quietly.
"I expected you to solve your own problems," said Suriyawong. ~ Orson Scott Card

He looked like a man who could survive a couple of flesh wounds, but then so had Achilles and Caesar. ~ Oyinkan Braithwaite

Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter. ~ Homer

The gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again. ~ Brad Pitt

So you're coming along with me, increasing our risk of being identified and allowing Achilles to get his two worst nemeses with one well-placed bomb, in order to save my life? ~ Orson Scott Card

Individuals build empires because they want their names to echo through time. They build massive constructs of stone and steel so that their descendants will remember the people who created the world that they only live in. There were buildings on Earth that were thousands of years old, sometimes the only remaining evidence of empires that thought they would last forever. Hubris, the professor had called it. When people build, they are trying to make an aspiration physical. When they die, their intentions are buried with them. All that's left is the building.
[Ozymandias syndrome, anyone? Ed.] ~ James S.A. Corey

As the 2018 World Cup Championship in Russia draws to a close, President Trump scores a hat-trick of diplomatic faux pas - first at the NATO summit, then on a UK visit, and finally with a spectacular own goal in Helsinki, thereby handing Vladimir Putin a golden propaganda trophy. For as long as this moron continues to queer the pitch by refusing to be a team player, America's Achilles' heel will go from bad to worse. It's high time somebody on his own side tackled him in his tracks. ~ Alex Morritt

I'll be Odysseus. You be Achilles." "Achilles dies in the end." "Then learn from his mistakes. ~ Pierce Brown

In the last book of the Iliad (24.602ff.), Achilles urges Priam to eat: even Niobe, he says, after all her children had been slaughtered by the gods, took food eventually. Both Priam and Achilles have been bereaved of their dearest, and yet they gather themselves, and eat, and sleep, and go on living. (...) ...there are two early Lucanian vases with mourners by a grave stele with the same inscription "spoken" by the tomb: "On my back I grow mallow and thick-rooted asphodel: / in my bosom I hold Oedipus, son of Laios." Even Oedipus, the great king of Thebes, archetype of tragedy, experienced a catastrophic fall and descended into the deepest pit of horrors; yet ordinary plants grow on his tomb. We are not so different. ~ Oliver Taplin

I don't understand what the big deal with Achilles is. Diomedes is the one running around murdering everybody. ~ Davin On The Iliad

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.
You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend,
To give you, what can you receive from me?
Only the friendship and the sympathy
Of one about to reach her journey's end. ~ T. S. Eliot

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. ~ Madeline Miller

If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it's that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles' heel for me. ~ Jayson Williams

Perhaps he simply assumed: a bitterness of habit, of boy after boy trained for music and medicine, and unleashed for murder. ~ Madeline Miller

Achilles absent was Achilles still! ~ Homer

My son, Achilles is of nobler birth than you and he is also by far the stronger man. But you are older than he is. It is for you to give him sound advice, make suggestions and give him a lead which he will follow to his own advantage.' Nestor ~ Homer

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory . ~ Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

The arrows of love, like Achilles' sword, carry with them the remedy for the wounds they cause. ~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

- 'I've never had a thing for homicidal charmers before.'
- 'But now you do?'
- 'Apparently.' -I muttered, knowing he could feel my raicing heartbeat under his chest.
- 'Well, if it helps, I've never had a thing for beautiful, deceptively brave, innocent charmers before.'
- 'And now you do?'
His grin widened, taking on a wolfish look.
- 'Definitely ~ Emma Winters

The craving for recognition is every artist's Achilles heel. ~ Marty Rubin

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides. ~ Adam Nicolson

Achilles too staggered a moment. He felt his soul change colour. Blood pooled at his feet, and though he continued to stand upright and triumphant in the sun, his spirit set off on its own downward path and approached the boarders of an unknown region. ~ David Malouf

At 49, I find it a little bit difficult to run these days. I've got grade four tears in both Achilles, shin splints, I got no cartilage the toes in my right foot, I've got bone marrow edemas under both knees, I've got one degenerating hip - that's the problem you get. ~ Russell Crowe

I am thinking of Achilles' grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry - sincere, maybe, for what that's worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry. ~ Tobias Wolff

And let Apollo drive Prince Hector back to battle,
breathe power back in his lungs, make him forget
the pain that racks his heart. Let him whip the Achaeans
in headlong panic rout and roll them back once more,
tumbling back on the oar-swept ships of Peleus' son Achilles.
And he, will launch his comrade Patroclus into action
and glorious Hector will cut him down with a spear
in front of Troy, once Patroclus has slaughtered
whole battalions of strong young fighting men
and among them all, my shining son Sarpedon.
But then - enraged for Patroclus -
brilliant Achilles will bring Prince Hector down.
And then, from that day on, I'll turn the tide of war:
back the fighting goes, no stopping it, ever. ~ Homer

Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness? ~ Homer

While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles. ~ Tim O'Reilly

The master always keeps a piece of learning
that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance
up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparing you until now. We will explain it when we get to the corresponding lesson. What does this mean? asks the curious student. I could tell you, responds the master, but it would be premature: you wouldn't understand at all. It will be explained to you next year. The master is always a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications. Thus does the triumphant Achilles drag Hector's corpse, attached to his chariot, around the city of Troy. ~ Jacques Ranciere

I had made the fatal mistake of believing in his touch, as if the intelligence of his hands, our orgasms, the way he penetrated me, had affected him as much as it had affected me. Perhaps this is the catch cry of the egoist: I love, therefore I must be loved. Perhaps it is the Achilles' heel of my gender. ~ Tobsha Learner

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to know - even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before destruction - than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too. ~ Isaac Asimov

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles whom we knew. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes? ~ Umberto Eco

If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos. ~ Gary William Flake

Achilles was murdered with a poisoned arrow, and Jason died alone, killed by his own rotting ship. Such is the fate of heroes. ~ Cassandra Clare

By the time Sami entered high school Mustafa had grudgingly accepted that the boy needed to know something of the patriarchs. For the sake of Sami's secular education he gulped back his discomfort. These Semitic myths, after all, were essential to the literary traditions Sami would study. So Mustafa delivered his interpretation of religious pre-history. He explained that, as with Oedipus or Achilles, there was psychopathic drama in the lives of the heroes, a drama in its essence no different from that of today's Speakers' Corner soapbox types, or of the schizophrenics following mysterious itineraries through the city's streets. The scriptural heroes heard the same internal mumblings and insinuations, but as they belonged to an epic age, with epic genres, these were granted mythic status. It was pre-psychological, pre-ironic. There was high seriousness everywhere, blowing out of the desert and rolling up from the sea. There was prophetic articulation of destiny. There was the terror of God's voice. ~ Robin Yassin-Kassab

Every footfall, every voice was Don Achille creeping up behind us or coming down toward us with a long knife, the kind used for slicing open a chicken breast. There was an odor of sautéing garlic. Maria, Don Achille's wife, would put me in the pan of boiling oil, the children would eat me, he would suck my head the way my father did with mullets. ~ Elena Ferrante

Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth. ~ Milan Kundera

The heat rose up my neck, wrapped fingers over my face. His hair fell around me, and I could smell nothing but him. The grain of his lips seemed to rest a hairsbreadth from mine. ~ Madeline Miller

he wanted to understand to the very end

- Pascal's night
- the nature of a diamond
- the melancholy of the prophets
- Achille's wrath
- the madness of those who kill
- the dreams of Mary Stuart
- Neanderthal fear
- the despair of the last Aztecs
- Nietzsche's long death throes
- the joy of the painter of Lascaux
- the rise and fall of an oak
- the rise and fall of Rome ~ Zbigniew Herbert

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. ~ Madeline Miller

Books were his Achilles heel. She ~ Stephen King

I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark. ~ George MacDonald Fraser

No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born. ~ Homer

She said that we didn't know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighbourhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano's grocery store before, had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale's father. And yet Don Achille's money had been made before. And the Solaras' money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn't know anything, they wouldn't talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille's son's and at the Solaras', and sent us, too. And they votes for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what had happened before was past, and in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too. ~ Elena Ferrante

Poke had never shared out so many raisins, because she had never had so many to share. But the little kids wouldn't understand that. They'd think, Poke gave us garbage, and Achilles gave us raisins. That's because they were stupid. ~ Orson Scott Card

At first, he talked about the flowers in the garden behind his country house in Surrey. His voice still had its Midlands accent but was soft now and barely audible. He knew the plants by name and took a few minutes with each of them: ageratum, coreopsis, echinacea, rudbeckia. The yarrow, he said, had rose-red flowers on two-foot stems. Achillea millefolium, the plant Achilles used to heal wounds. ~ Frederick Weisel

I try to create some stupid entertainment for really smart people that they don't feel too stupid watching. In 'Xanadu,' the biggest laugh was a reference to Achilles. ~ Douglas Carter Beane

Europe's enduring localism, which had been the weak link in Christendom, became in turn the Achilles heel of the dynastic state. ~ Mark Greengrass

Name one hero who was happy."
"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.
"I can't."
"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."
"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.
"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."
"Why me?"
"Because you're the reason. Swear it."
"I swear it ~ Madeline Miller

Medusa's lips split with that challenging smile, and for a second he recognized her somehow, he knew her on some primal level, the same way he'd recognized he behind the face of Brunhilde, the helmet of Achilles, or in hat ship maneuvering in space ,and then she flickered away. The simulation darkened around him. Tom pulled out his neural wire, Medusa's dangerous smile lingering in his brain. ~ S.J. Kincaid

Those seconds, half seconds, that the line of our gaze connected, were the only moment in my day that I felt anything at all. ~ Madeline Miller

To use the term 'clerk' as an insult is simply a banal vulgarity; Pessoa and Svevo, however would have welcomed it as a just attribute of the poet. The latter does not resemble Achilles or Diomedes, ranting on their war-chariots, but is more like Ulysses, who knows that he is no one. He manifests himself in this revelation of impersonality that conceals him in the prolixity of things, as travelling erases the traveller in the confused murmur of the street. ~ Claudio Magris

Achilles only had an Achilles heel. I have an entire Achilles body. ~ Woody Allen

As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beauty's wound is sharper than any weapon's, and it runs through the eyes down to the soul. It is through the eye that love's wound passes, and I now became a prey to a host of emotions... ~ Achilles Tatius

Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. ~ Alan W. Watts

I fear that he might be my Achilles' heel. My Romeo to Juliet, my Jack to Rose, my Noah to Allie. ~ Anke Van Zweel

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. ~ Madeline Miller

He ran his hand up and down his left achilles tendon. Very tender; better pay attention to it and back off if it gets any worse. Maybe ice it. The old Injury Evasion Fandango. Did it ever end? ~ John L. Parker Jr.

That is - your friend?"
"Philtatos," Achilles replied, sharply. Most beloved. ~ Madeline Miller

...all the grace I saw then was his own: simple, unadorned, glorious. ~ Madeline Miller

I lean down and drop a kiss on the top of his head. "Goodbye, Achilles," I whisper, and I leave Maxen Ashley Colchester alone with his head in his hands. I leave and get in my car and go back home, remembering the feel of his hair on my lips.
I will break from loving him, I think. I will split with it, burn with it.
And yet, for the first time, I know what I have to do. I know that I'm a good man, I know that I'd be a good leader. I know that I can stop Melwas and keep Greer safe. I know how to do it.
I have to become more than a prince.
I have to become a king myself. ~ Sierra Simone

This is what Achilles will feel like when he is old. And then I remembered: he will never be old. ~ Madeline Miller

Achilles acted as if he had already won, and because the other kids followed him, he had. ~ Orson Scott Card

When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together. ~ Madeline Miller

I wish I had more confidence. I think that's probably my Achilles' heel. If I had more, I probably would have felt emboldened to make more interesting music earlier on, or really go for it in an artistic or songwriting sense. ~ Beck

He must lay siege against Briseis' walls and conquer her. Love would be his sword and he would break all her chains. ~ Janell Rhiannon

(ghost of)ACHILLES: How can I force obedience on this? In other times I've used the fear of death to make a woman bow herself to me. If not the fear of her own death, then fear for someone else, a husband or a child. How can I bend this woman to my will?
(ghost of)POLYXENA: I think I will not bend.
IPHIGENIA: You see, it's as we've tried to tell you, Great Achilles. Women are no good to you dead. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

Sully's, on South Prospect, was the quintessential biker-bar, complete with hefty, leather-clad Harley worshippers, and stringy-haired heroin-addicted women who made the rounds among the bikers. Its décor was decidedly Medieval Garage Sale, with a dose of Americana thrown in. An old motorcycle carcass dangled from the vaulted section of the beamed ceiling, and the wood plank floors were littered with butts, scarred by bottle caps and splattered with homogenized bodily fluids. The only light to be had was from neon, dying sconces, and lit cigarettes. Various medieval swords perched on each wall, reminiscent of the times of Beowulf and Fire Dragons on the Barrow. ~ Kelli Jae Baeli

If we never challenge our shortcomings, we ensure that they remain our Achilles' heel. ~ Gina Greenlee

There is no greater species better crafted for emotional terrorism than women. We slice away at the Achilles until our victims are left feeling completely devoid of value and unfit for love, friendship, and in extreme cases, air. We've been bred to see others' successes as a direct assault to our own, and this is especially true when it comes to weight. Seeing someone who is heavier than us viewing themselves in a positive light is detrimental to our own self-esteem. So we attack and tear down until eventually that person feels as bad about herself as we do about ourselves. ~ Brittany Gibbons

The girl who tied his guts into physical knots.
His Achilles heel.
If Paige was the magnet, then Reaper was the metal.
There was no circumstance he could ever think of that would sway him from being drawn to her. ~ V. Theia

Achilles replies that there is no equality of right between the
weak and the strong, for men have never made pacts with lions nor
have lambs and wolves ever shared the same desires. This was the law of the heroic gentes, based on the belief that the strong were of a different and more noble nature than the weak. Hence arose that law of war through which, by force of arms, the victors deprive the defeated of all their rights of natural liberty, so that the Romans took them
as slaves in place of material things. ~ Giambattista Vico

Whatever the poets pretend, it is plain they give immortality to none but themselves; it is Homer and Virgil we reverence and admire, not Achilles or Aeneas. With historians it is quite the contrary; our thoughts are taken up with the actions, persons, and events we read, and we little regard the authors. ~ Jonathan Swift

He steps to the side to make room for me, but even so, his shoulders take up half my space. Not that I mind. Men are my Achilles heel, my Kryptonite. I love their smell, their taste, the sounds they make when they come inside of me. But between a full-time job, law school, hours of reading cases, and study groups, I barely have time to sleep, much less date. ~ Magda Alexander

I'm on his death list, too." "Then why are you still alive?" asked Peter. "Because, contrary to widespread belief, Achilles is not a genius and he makes mistakes. ~ Orson Scott Card

Look north.
Achilles on the rampart by the ditch:
He lifts his face to 90; draws his breath;
And from the bottom of his heart emits
So long and loud and terrible a scream,
The icy scabs at either end of earth
Winced in their sleep; and in the heads that fought
It seemed as if, and through his voice alone,
The whole world's woe could be abandoned to the sky.

An in that instant all the fighting glassed. ~ Christopher Logue

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. ~ Madeline Miller

Achilles makes a sound like choking. "There are no bargains between lions and men. I will kill you and eat you raw." His spearpoint flies in a dark whirlwind, bright as the evening-star, to catch the hollow at Hector's throat. ~ Madeline Miller

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--
'[kisses her]'
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!--
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack'd;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour! ~ Christopher Marlowe

Fallon, you're my Achilles Heel. I want to fuck you senseless, until you feel me imprinted on you even when I'm not inside you. But that's all I want - all I can allow myself. ~ Naima Simone

I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was. ~ James A. Michener

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 ~ Madeline Miller

If I were Achilles I would put my foot in a f**k off block of concrete! ~ Eddie Izzard

But to exercise the intellect the prince should read histories, and study there the actions of illustrious men, to see how they have borne themselves in war, to examine the causes of their victories and defeat, so as to avoid the latter and imitate the former; and above all do as illustrious man did, who took as an exemplar one who had been praised and famous before him, and whose achievements and deeds he always kept in his mind, as it is said Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar Alexander, Scipio Cyrus. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

When Achilles is most useful and loyal to you, that is when he has most certainly betrayed you? ~ Orson Scott Card