Mary Renault Quotes & Sayings

He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support. — Mary Renault

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

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

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

Death was the price of life. — Mary Renault

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

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. — Mary Renault

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

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

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

I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She — Mary Renault

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. ... — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

(Alexander)'Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.'
(Hephaistion)'That's stupid. You've got me now. Do you think I'd let you go mad? — Mary Renault

Often in those two months I said to myself, If I live, I will wipe this time from my mind; I cannot even bear the memory. Yet now I turn to it. He is gone; and all times when he was there seem like lost riches. — Mary Renault

Never mind, mother, you weren't far out; he is Alexander too. — Mary Renault

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

Money buys many things ... The best of which is freedom. — Mary Renault

It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they
feel the black cold of chaos. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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

May the Mother curse him and all gods below, and may Night's Daughters hunt him down into the ground! And on the hand that sheds his blood let there be a blessing. — Mary Renault

I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences. — Mary Renault

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

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. — Mary Renault

He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him. — Mary Renault

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

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

The maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood. — Mary Renault

Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change whenever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas' palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain. — Mary Renault

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 — Mary Renault

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him. — Mary Renault

What keeps the democracy alive at all but the hatred of excellence; the desire of the base to see no head higher than their own? — Mary Renault

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

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

I doubt he'd ever in his life lain down with anyone for whom he had not felt some kind of fondness. He needed love as a palm tree needs water, all his life long: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough. It laid him open to false friends, as anyone will tell you. Well, for all that, no man is made a god when he is dead and can do no harm, without love. He needed love and never forgave its betrayal, which he had no understanding of. For he himself, if it was given him with a whole heart, never misused it, nor despised the giver. He took it gratefully, and felt bound by it. — Mary Renault

To hate excellence is to hate the gods. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust. — Mary Renault

WITHOUT LAUGHTER, WHAT MAN of sense could endure either politics or war? — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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 — Mary Renault

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

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

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

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

I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy. — Mary Renault

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

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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) — Mary Renault

Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love. — Mary Renault

It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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

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

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river. — Mary Renault

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

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. — Mary Renault

and Alexander was nothing if not resourceful. He had had the legs of her chair cut down. — Mary Renault

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

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. — Mary Renault

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

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

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

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. — Mary Renault

By her shining and her power he knew her. — Mary Renault

Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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

Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship. — Mary Renault

Do not believe that others will die, not you ... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier. — Mary Renault

When we serve the great, they are our destiny. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask ... — Mary Renault

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate. — Mary Renault

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

Longing performs all things — Mary Renault

There is nothing like despair to make one throw oneself upon the gods. — Mary Renault

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. — Mary Renault

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting. — Mary Renault

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge. — Mary Renault

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence. — Mary Renault