Quotes from Mary Renault

Metà dei guai del mondo sono causati da uomini non allenati a risentirsi per una affermazione fallace come per un insulto.

where there is war there's spoil. From this it was not far to roving on adventure. Young men could set themselves up in life; kings could grow rich without hard taxes, which pleased their people;

There is no doubt that a really first-class fire, when no fear for human life intrudes, is one of the great atavistic joys still known to man. Today it is very shocking to think of archaeological treasures burning; to Macedonians and still more to Greeks, the significance of Persepolis was rather different.

As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor.... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question.

And suddenly he knew that this was not, as he had been saying to himself, simply an unlucky day. It was a day dedicated beforehand to a lost cause.

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

when you feel less superior it seems you feel more lonely.

Her estimate of human nature, and more particularly of her own sex, went up as the coffee went down.

Often in those two months I said to myself, If I live, I will wipe this time from my mind; I cannot even bear the memory. Yet now I turn to it. He is gone; and all times when he was there seem like lost riches.

If only the clouds would lift, and she could sit down and read, she knew that she would feel better at once.

Do you every worry about the situation you leave your characters in when you stop writing? I mean, they've got to stay put like that till one starts again.

Nature had no mysteries, only facts not yet correctly observed and analyzed. Proceed from this sound first principle, and one would never miss one's way.

Alexias) 'You burned this and you kept no copy?' (Plato) 'When one offers to the gods, one brings a whole beast to the altar. If it was an image of what is not, then it was false and ought to be destroyed; and if of what is, then a little fire will not destroy it.

But sometimes his face would change, as if sorrow touched his shoulder, saying, "Had you forgotten me?

She thought: This is how all life should be accepted, in desireless wonder, reaching out for nothing and thrusting nothing away, rejoicing in the different essence of each moment as it blazes into the present from the folded future. But she was under no illusions; for a life of such moments one needed a heart without roots, a spirit free in the wind, and empty hands. Once she had had them. She would never know them again. She had committed too much to earth.

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

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

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

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

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

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 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.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.