157 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

All these years you have made a boy of him. But with me, he shall be a man.

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