Quotes from Mary Stewart

This is the way of love, I find; one longs so fervently for the beloved to achieve the best ends that he is spared nothing.

I thought wryly that nobody ever wanted advice anyway: all that most people sought was ratification of their own views.

The village is perched on a precipitous hillside, and the houses are built in tiers, one up behind the other, the floor of one level with the roof of the next. The whole village looks as if it were just about to slide into the depths of the valley below.

some man of power must have existed, with gifts that seemed miraculous to his own times.

What a personage says or does reveals a certain moral purpose; and a good element of character, if the purpose so revealed is good. Such goodness is possible in every type of personage, even in a woman. ARISTOTLE: The Art of Poetry. (tr. Ingram Bywater.)

I think that knowing the future might be disturbing, but it can be good as well; knowing and not being frightened, having the time to make all one's arrangements, and knowing that there are good hands waiting for the things and people one cares about.

I wondered irritably why married women so often adopted that tone, almost, of superior satisfaction in the things they had to suffer.

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

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark.

I sometimes think it's a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.

The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.

The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.

Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.

It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.

I doubt if there are many normal women who can resist looking at houses. I believe, in fact, that when a house is up for sale more than half the people who look over it are not prospective buyers, but merely ladies who cannot resist exploring someone else's house.

Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you...

The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try

It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.

I am nothing, yes; I am air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. But out there in the light I have a young king and a bright sword to do my work for me, and build what will stand when my name is only a word for forgotten songs and outworn wisdom, and when your name, Morgause, is only a hissing in the dark.