Mary Stewart Quotes

I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.

There was one thing that stood like stone among the music and moonfroth of the evening's gaieties. It was stupid, it was terrifying, it was wonderful, but it had happened and I could do nothing about it. For better or worse, I was head over ears in love ...

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

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.

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 ...

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?

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

Press on, regardless.

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

All that we have is to live what life brings. Die what death comes.

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

I'm not a person whom the sight of olive oil repels, and I love Greek cooking. We had onion soup with grated cheese on top; then the souvlaka, which comes spiced with lemon and herbs, and flanked with chips and green beans in oil and a big dish of tomato salad. Then cheese, and halvas, which is a sort of loaf made of grated nuts and honey, and is delicious. And finally the wonderful grapes of Greece.

The best words in the best order ... one always go the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Poetry was awful good material to think with.

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.

There are such people, unfortunates who have to be angry before they can feel alive. I had sometimes wondered if it were some old relic of pagan superstition, the fear of risking the jealousy and anger of the gods, that made such people afraid of even small happinesses. Or perhaps it was only that tragedy is more self-important than laughter.

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

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.

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all.

Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades,
Vision narrows, and the far
Sky-edge is gone with the sun.
Be content with the small spark
Of the coal, the smell
Of food, and the breath
Of frost beyond the shut door.
Home is here, and familiar things;
A cup, a wooden bowl, a blanket,
Prayer, a gift for the god, and sleep.
(And music, says the harp, And music.)
Rest here, enchanter, while the fire dies.
In a breath, in an eyelid's fall,
You will see them, the dreams;
The sword and the young king,
The white horse and the running water,
The lit lamp and the boy smiling.
Dreams, dreams, enchanter! Gone with the harp's echo
when the strings
Fall mute; with the flame's shadow when the fire
Dies.
Be still, and listen.
Far on the black air Blows the great wind, rises
The running tide, flows the clear river.
Listen, enchanter, hear
Through the black air and the singing air
The music….

My lord, when you are looking for ... what I am looking for, you have to look in strange places. Men can never look at the sun, except downwards, at his reflection in things of earth. If he is reflected in a dirty puddle, he is still the sun. There is nowhere I will not look, to find him.

I had been so used to God's voice in the fire and stars that I had forgotten to listen for it in the counsels of men.

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 ...

A child thinks life is fair. A man stands by the consequences of his deeds.

People are straightforward enough, on the whole, till one starts to look for crooked motives, and then, oh boy, how crooked can they be!

I saw it begin; even so, after battle, Ambrosious' very presence had give the wounded strength and the dying comfort. Whatever it was he had had about him, Arthur had the same; I was to see it often in the future; it seemed that he shed brightness and strength round him where he went, and still had it ever renewed in himself. As he grew older, I knew it would be renewed more hardly and at a cost, but now he was very young, with the flower of manhood still to come. After this, I thought, who could maintain that youth itself made him unfit for kingship? Not Lot, stiffened in his ambition, grimly scheming for a dead king's throne. It was Arthur's very youth which had whistled up today the best that men had in them, as a huntsman calls up the following back, or an enchanter whistles up the wind.

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.

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

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.

Something was moving; there was a kind of breathing brightness in the air, the wind of God brushing by, invisible in sunlight.

We have lived under the edge of doom, and feel ourselves now facing the long-threatened fate. But hear this Emrys: fate is made by men, not gods.

His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. 'You were prepared to take chances - once.'
'Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge - my duty.' The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. 'I - I was all he had. Besides that, it couldn't be allowed to matter.'
'What couldn't.'
'That you were all I had.

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

I saw the first light, fore-running the sun, gather in a cup of the eastern cloud, gather and grow and brim, till at last it spilled like milk over the golden lip, to smear the dark face of heaven from end to end. From east to north, and back to south again, the clouds slackened, the stars, trembling on the verge of extinction, guttered in the dawn wind, and the gates of day were ready to open at the trumpet ...

the god does not speak to those who have no time to listen.

the smell of resin filled the air. A thrush was singing somewhere. Late harebells were thick among the grass, and small blue butterflies moved over the white flowers of the blackberry. There was a hive of wild bees under the roof of the chapel; their humming filled the air, the sound of summer's end. Through

I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.

The street lamps glowed like ripe oranges among the bare boughs. Below in the wet street their globes glimmered down and down, to drown in their own reflections.

I found that I was reaching, automatically, for another cigarette; my eyes and throat felt hot and aching, and my brain stupid. I let it slip back into the packet. I had smoked too much that evening already.

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.

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.

Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.

But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power, that they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.

Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

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.

A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship.

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.

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

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.

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.

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

The difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

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

Oh, hell." He landed beside me, soft-footed on the pine needles. "This is beginning to have all the elements of a farce, isn't it? Too many villains, and nothing to tie them up with.

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

We are given chances, and after that it is up to us. If we have neither the courage nor the wit to grasp them and follow them up, then they are gone, and gone for ever. At least we must try.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

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 can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.

Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.

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.

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.

But the Easter sacrifice in their own homes - well, think it over. I used to think the same as you, and I still hate to see the lambs and calves going home to their deaths on Good Friday. But isn't it a million times better than the way we do it at home, however 'humane' we try to be? Here, the lamb's petted, unsuspicious, happy - you see it trotting along with the children like a little dog. Till the knife's in its throat, it has no idea it's going to die. Isn't that better than those dreadful lorries at home, packed full of animals, lumbering on Mondays and Thursdays to the slaughterhouses, where, be as humane as you like, they can smell the blood and the fear, and have to wait their turn in a place just reeking of death?

Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be
doing all the time.

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

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.

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

It did not occur to them to refuse. They knew that if you find some person or creature in desperate need of help which you can supply you have a human duty to supply it, even if it could inconvenience or even hurt you to do so. This, after all, is how the greatest and best deeds in the world have been done, and though the children did not say this aloud, they knew it inside themselves without even thinking about it.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.

Nothing ever happens to me.

I'd settle for what you had to give