Mary Stewart Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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? — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory. — Mary Stewart

Life had stopped. Life would have to go on. Life went on, and in time the unbelievable began to happen; pleasure and happiness came back, and even joy. But love? Not again. I said it very firmly. Not again. — Mary Stewart

In the morning it was fine, with one of those glittering sharp days that December sometimes throws down like bright gold among the lead of winter's coinage. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

Have you ever thought, when something dreadful happens, 'a moment ago things were not like this; let it be then, not now, anything but now'? And you try and try to remake then, but you know you can't. So you try to hold the moment quite still and not let it move on and show itself. — Mary Stewart

Nothing ever happens to me. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

William's mother, dead these six years. He spoke of her with love, but without grief. Six years, and whatever the loss, happiness steals back. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

Press on, regardless. — Mary Stewart

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace. — Mary Stewart

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

The Romans gave them Roman names, and let them be; but the Christians refuse to believe in them, and their priests berate the poorer folk for clinging to the old ways - and no doubt for wasting offerings which would do better at some hermit's cell than at some ancient holy place in the forest. But still the simple folk creep out to leave their offerings, and when these vanish by morning, who is to say that a god has not taken them? This, — Mary Stewart

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

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 — Mary Stewart

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

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

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

The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult. — Mary Stewart

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

Used every man according to his capacity. — Mary Stewart

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

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

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

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. — Mary Stewart

It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes. — Mary Stewart

By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

One always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

I'd settle for what you had to give — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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 ... — Mary Stewart

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

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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 — Mary Stewart

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 ... — Mary Stewart

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

The boredom and annoyance that shut down over it were humiliatingly plain to see. I could have slapped her for it. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted. — Mary Stewart

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 ... — Mary Stewart

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 ... — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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 ... — Mary Stewart

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 — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

It was nearing 9 O'clock, and the fist duck was drawing down. Behind the trees, the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of the day had dropped, and the evening was very still. The stream sounded loud. I walked down to the gate and stood leaning on the top bar, enjoying the scent of the roses, and straining to listen for any sound from the lane or the road beyond. — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good. — Mary Stewart

Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees. — Mary Stewart

I remember thinking with a queer detached portion of my mind that here was someone wringing her hands. One reads about it and one never sees it, and now here it was. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer's evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .' The — Mary Stewart

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

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

Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding. — Mary Stewart

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

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

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

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. — Mary Stewart

A round moon stood low in the sky, pale still, and smudged with shadow, and thin at one edge like a worn coin. There was a scatter of small stars, with here and there the shepherd stars herding them, and across from the moon one great star alone, burning white. The shadows were long and soft on the seeding grasses. A — Mary Stewart

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

I doubt if any son every knew more about his father and his father's father than I, with all you have told me; but telling is not the same. There was alot of knowing to make up. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

Kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

Damn it, the tiger played velvet paws with me, didn't he? — Mary Stewart

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

a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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. — Mary Stewart

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? — Mary Stewart