Quotes from Mary Stewart

I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.

I think there is only one. Oh, there are gods everywhere, in the hollow hills, in the wind and the sea, in the very grass we walk on and the air we breathe, and in the bloodstained shadows where men like Belasius wait for them. But I believe there must be one who is God Himself, like the great sea, and all the rest of us, small gods and men and all, like rivers, we all come to Him in the end.

Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more…

To expect and dread a thing for a lifetime; does not prepare you for the thing itself.

The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.

Nothing ever happens to me.

Life does just go on, and you change, and you can't go back. You have to live it the way it comes.

Press on, regardless.

You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.

I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.

If anyone was to perform the classic folly of taking a midnight stroll among the murderous gentlemen with whom the hotel was probably packed, it was not going to be me.

At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.

I suppose my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out.

If a man goes up into Parnassus after sunset, why should he not see strange things? The gods still walk there, and a man who would not go carefully in the country of the gods is a fool.

I'd live with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there... one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it - but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn't quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins... the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the stockings-to-wash, the tin soldier...

Then she saw me watching her. For perhaps two seconds our eyes met and held. I knew then why the ancients armed the cruellest god with arrows; I felt the shock of it right through my body.

I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.

Only a child expects life to be just; it's a man's part to stand by the consequences of his deeds.