Quotes from Mary Renault

There is truth and truth,' said the priest of Delos. 'It is true after its kind.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.

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.

the maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood.

The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

It is a grief to see a hero go down to the house of Hades. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes around the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long.

I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She

When I rode on to meet the army, I learned a thing one never forgets after: how much easier it is to move the many than the few.

The sons of dreams outlive the sons of seed.

His feelings were confused; he wanted to grasp till Alexander's very bones were somehow engulfed within himself, but knew this to be wicked and mad; he would kill anyone who harmed a hair of his head.

The man who sleeps on a warning does not deserve one. What wait till tomorrow? I will go today?

There are always men who take their own measure against greatness, and hate it not for what it is, but for what they are. They can envy even the dead. So much Alexander saw. He did not understand, since it was not in him, the power such men have to rouse in others the sleeping envy they once had a decent shame of; to turn respect for excellence into hate. Nor did Kallisthenes understand it in himself. Vanity begets it, vanity covers it up.

You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.

The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these.

It was his nature to believe anything, before he would believe he could be wrong.

Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that's what makes a king.

Then the pain of loss leaped out on me, like a knife in the night when one has been on one's guard all day.

Man's immortality is not to live for ever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Men are better watching the seasons, and putting good into the earth, than running together in cities, where they listen all day to each other's noises and forgot the gods. Acharnai is quite far enough.

At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense.

We are weary of ourselves, and have dreamed a king. If now the gods have sent us one, let us not ask him to be more than mortal.