Mary Renault Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Don't you understand even seedtime and reaping? How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

Mary Renault
You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

Mary Renault
Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

Mary Renault
It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Mary Renault
Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

Mary Renault
In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

Mary Renault
But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners.

Mary Renault
What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own?

Mary Renault
He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.

Mary Renault
Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

Mary Renault
He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship…

Mary Renault
He had come back a man, and faithless like a man. He knew that he had longed for her; that true friends share everything, except the past before they met. If only she would weep, even that, and let him comfort her; but she would not humble herself before a man. if only he would run to her side and cling to her; but his manhood was hard-won, no mortal should make him a child again.

Mary Renault
It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies.

Mary Renault
Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.
Herakles speaking

Mary Renault
We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

Mary Renault
Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

Mary Renault
You may keep your ten thousand talents; I am not in want of money, I have taken enough. Why only the half of your kingdom to the Euphrates? You offer me the part in exchange for the whole. Your daughter whom you speak of, I shall marry if I choose, whether given by you or not. Your family is safe; no ransom is required of you; come here yourself and make your suit to me, you shall have them free. If you desire our friendship, you have only to ask.

Mary Renault
Half the world's troubles come from men not being trained to resent a fallacy as much as an insult.

Mary Renault
His sense of his deserts had grown. Now he was sure that what he desired, he deserved, and anyone who denied it merited punishment.

Mary Renault
An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

Mary Renault
It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that. How many have tried, because of him? Not only those I have seen; there will be men to come. Those who look in mankind only for their own littleness, and make them believe in that, kill more than he ever will in all his wars.

Mary Renault
But he had all an artist needs, except the spark from the god.

Mary Renault
All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy — and that is as well, for one could not bear it — whose grief is that the principals never met.

Mary Renault
The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

Mary Renault
There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

Mary Renault
You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets so that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.'

Mary Renault
After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, an what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

Mary Renault
So now, for mercy and honor shown to my people, my lord is barbarous; a tyrant, because he punished his would-be murderers, the right of their meanest citizen; a mere vaunting soldier, though wherever he went he brought Greece with him, the Greece he honored, of which these liars are the unworthy heirs.

Mary Renault
He looked just like any other disreputable old demagogue, one who lives by denouncing and exposing while he is in credit, and, when he is out, by sycophancy and informations, with a little perjury thrown in.

Mary Renault
He thought, like all other fathers, that I was younger and sillier than himself at the same age.

Mary Renault