The Silence of the Girls

“Don’t think about your previous life,” he said. “That’s all over now—you’ll only make yourself miserable if you start brooding about it. Forget! This is your life now.”

Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: Remember.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the butcher.”

died with both hands gripping Achilles’s spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away.