157 Quotes by Mary Renault

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

We lived in the Bull Court; a city sealed in a palace, and a life sealed in with death. Yet it is a proud city, and a strong fierce life. A man once in it is of it till he dies. So I, who have gray beginning in my beard, still say "it is", as if the Bull Court stood and I might yet go back to it.

Always, in the Bull Court, our most precious trophies were the gifts of the dead.

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

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

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

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.

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