157 Quotes by Mary Renault

Is he weeping?” said the one with the softest heart.

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.

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.

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.

They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature’s hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.

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.

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

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.

I’m not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.