Mary Renault Quotes

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.

Power is the test. Some, once they have it, are content to buy the show of liking, and punish those who withhold it; then you have a despot. But some keep a true eye for how they seem to others, and care about it, which holds them back from much mischief.

When we were up in the hills, he took me for an early ride, to taste, as he said, the clean air of Persia once again. I breathed it and said, "Al'skander, we are home." "Truly. I too." He looked towards the folded ranges, whose peaks had had the first snowfalls. "I'd say this only to you; shut it in your heart. Macedon was my father's country. This is mine.

Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.

Go in peace," I said to him; "bear no ill-will to me, for Necessity yields to no man: and do not complain of me to our mother, for her blood is on your head as well as mine.
If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains.
But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away; and when a man has once felt the breath of the Honoured Ones upon his neck, he will not bid them across the threshold. So forgive me, and suffer what must be. The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow.

He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship ...

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.

I came for the cause. Since I could not help, at least don't let me remember that I hindered it. I've learned how to manage on the ship; it will be nothing, after all this. Goodbye, Niko. You have made me a truer philosopher. Go with God.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

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.

It gives me no joy to be praised at the expense of a better artist, by someone who does not know the difference or who thinks me too vain to be aware of it myself.

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, 'Is it a queer book?'
'No,' said Laurie.
'Oh,' said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

When we serve the great, they are our destiny.

You wished for me, Athenians; I am here. Do not question me, do not hurt me; I am the wish sprung from your heart, and if you wound me your heart will bleed for it. Your love made me. Do not take it away; for without love I am a temple forsaken by its god, where dark Alastor will enter. It was you, Athenians, who conjured me, a daimon whose food is love. Feed me, then, and I will clothe you with glory, and show you to yourselves in the image of your desire. I am hungry: feed me. It is too late to repent.

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening. Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.

Men are seldom helpless against their own evil wishes, and in their souls they know it. But common men love flattery not less than tyrants, if anyone will sell it to them. If they are told that the struggle for the good is an illusion, that no one need be ashamed to drop his shield and run, that the coward is the natural man, the hero is fable, many will be grateful. But will the city, or mankind, be better?'

No being a sophist, trained to bring out answers pat, I could only say, 'But it's such marvelous theater.

It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.

I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.

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

The school discussed friendship often. It is, they learned, one of the things man can least afford to lack; necessary to the good life, and beautiful in itself. Between friends is no need of justice, for neither wrong nor inequality can exist ... Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time. (Fire From Heaven, Page 161)

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.

It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.

Some would take nothing, like Perdiccas; whose inclusion suggests, in spite of Ptolemy, that he did the right thing at Thebes. "What are you keeping for yourself?" he asked. "Hope," said Alexander, to which Perdiccas' prophetic answer was, "That I'll share.

Death was the price of life.

The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.

At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.

War's such a boomerang it's impossible to guarantee anyone's protection in the long run.

Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.

Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.

Reg coughed repressively.Habit had made of the standard nouns and adjectives in his own vocabulary something merely conventional,like italics or points of exclamation.He sometimes found Laurie's conversation highly obscene,and would have voiced his disapproval to anyone he had liked less.

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies

The world had broken; the pieces lay like shattered gold, spoil for the strongest.

It is a strange thing to recall; but as I fell asleep, I was wondering how it might feel to be courted for one's beauty. I expect Pythagoras would have told me that in some past life, as youth or woman, I had been cruel to my lovers, and had chosen to make amends. In my time I have talked with many philosophers, who have expounded to me the ways of the gods with men. Out of them all, Pythagoras' belief seems to me the most just, supposing it is true. But then, if it is, and all these things befall us, unless we have the Sight we shall never know.

It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

With a cold barren weariness that quenched the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go.
Not wicked, he thought: that's not the word, that's sentimentality. These are just runts. Souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don't sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he's gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they'll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on. ...

Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live.

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

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

His mouth felt cold to mine ; he neither opened his eyes, nor spoke, nor moved. I said in my heart, "Too late I am here within your cloak, I who never of my own will would have denied you anything. Time and death and change are unforgiving, and love lost in the time of youth never returns again.

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

Never destroy without thought your enemy's pretences; they are usually your best weapon against him.

Don't talk so, Lysis. I'm sure you kept your head much better than I did." He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, "Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, 'Last year was better'?"-"Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games."-"We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay ... It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten.

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.

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.

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

Longing performs all things

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.

Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.

The tenet of the philosopher that for each man there was only one perfect friend;

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.

Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret
there, I have seen is slavery.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

Presently, he looked at the people standing round and said, "You have leave to go."
They bowed out. When the lads behind him started to follow, he reached out and caught one by the arm, saying, "No, you stay, Hephaistion." The tall boy came back with a lightening of all his face, and stood close beside him. He said to me, "The others are the Companions of the Prince; but we two are just Hephaistion and Alexander."
"So it was" I said, smiling at them, "in the tent of Achilles".
He nodded; it was a thought he was used to.

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and
tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that
smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with
his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer
questions.

If one sat up as long as an hour past bedtime, except on Christmas and birthdays, one would be ill. Laurie, who had had this explained to him many times and accepted it as incontrovertible fact, inferred from it that after three hours one would probably die.

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat.

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

She looked up at the whirling effulgent cloud, and thought, I brought down the fire from heaven; I have lived with glory. A thunderbolt struck from the sky and all was gone.

Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.

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

Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.

He was like a fine olive tree, which when its roots are checked one way will put them out another. Summer or winter, storm or calm, his soul sought justice and the end of wrong.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

I said, 'We have dreamed, dear friend. Another time, we might awaken. Let it be a dream forgotten at morning.' That seemed a better way of saying it than, 'Never remind me of this, for fear I should stick a knife in you.

I looked at him, tipping down the coarse wine like a man who expects to put up with worse. I felt I was looking my last at the lad I still remembered. I was right. When I saw him again, it was five years later, and not in Athens. He was tanned like the thong of a javelin, and as tough as the shaft, a soldier who looked to have been cradled in a shield; but the oddest change, I think, was to see in one always so mindful of convention that careless outlandishness you find in irregular troops of great renown; men who seem to say, "Take it or leave it, you who never went where we have been. We are the only judges of one another.

But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

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

What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.

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

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There

If anyone has the right to be measured by the standards of his own time, it is Alexander. Hermann Bengston, The Greeks and the Persians

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.