Quotes from Mary Stewart

It was over, the awkward moment, the dreaded moment, sliding past in a ripple of commonplaces, the easy mechanical politenesses that are so much more than empty convention; they are the greaves and cuirasses that arm the naked nerve.

Funny, one somehow imagines her snuffing quietly out now, the way the moon would if the sun vanished.

there's always something there, if one can find the treatment. The same old material, the same old line, the same old setting – all that counts is the quality of the mind that processes them.

Literature and fiction are full of femmes fatales, but there is also an homme fatal, an altogether rarer bird, and pity help the lonely and impressionable female who comes within range of him.

One always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture.

William's mother, dead these six years. He spoke of her with love, but without grief. Six years, and whatever the loss, happiness steals back.

Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees.

It is one thing to have the gift of seeing the spirits and hearing the Gods who move about us as we come and go; but it is a gift of darkness as well as light.

You made a discovery yesterday; remember? 'No man is an Island.' It's true in more ways than one. Don't go on hating yourself because there are some things you can't do and can't face on your own. None of us can.

I was back on the scented hillside with the moon coming out above the ruins of the temple where nothing remains now of the Goddess but her night-owls brooding. So

and behind the stone the faint drifting of the stars that is not movement, but the heavens breathing. Still

a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome.

The Romans gave them Roman names, and let them be; but the Christians refuse to believe in them, and their priests berate the poorer folk for clinging to the old ways—and no doubt for wasting offerings which would do better at some hermit's cell than at some ancient holy place in the forest. But still the simple folk creep out to leave their offerings, and when these vanish by morning, who is to say that a god has not taken them? This

Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.

Not as others had wanted to learn, for power or excitement, or for the prosecution of some enmity or private greed; but because he had seen, darkly with a child's eyes, how the gods move with the winds and speak with the sea and sleep in the gentle herbs; and how God himself is in the sum of all that is on the face of the lovely earth.

It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.

this might be a beauty to send men mad. Her body was slight with a child's slenderness, but her breasts were full and pointed and her throat round as a lily stem. Her hair was rosy gold, streaming long and unbound over the golden-green robe. The large eyes that I remembered were gold-green too, liquid and clear as a stream running over mosses, and the small mouth lifted into a smile over kitten's teeth

In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now?

And in another light-year or two I was through the word-barrier, and the book had suddenly reached the stage – the wonderful moment to get to – where I could walk right into my imaginary country and see things that I had not consciously created, and listen to people talking and watch them moving, all apparently independent of me.

Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.

The sour smell was not the smell of fungus. It was unlit incense, and cold ashes, and unsaid prayers. I

I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.

It is for you to choose. Choice is man's right, and for that I leave you free.

I supposed there were circumstances in which it was correct, even praiseworthy, for a girl to bash a man's head in with a lamp while he was kissing her...