134 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

I sat at the kitchen table, staring at the blind white blankness in front of me, and slowly, like a clear spring welling up from the common earth, the poem rose and spread and filled me, unstoppable as flood water, technique unknotting even as it ran, like snags rolled away on the flood. When it comes, it is worth everything in the world.

There is too much easy talk about"inspiration," but at such times one sees it exactly for what it is, a breathing in of all experience, all apprehension of beauty, all love. As a fire needs air to make it burn, so a poem needs to be fueled by each one of these. And the greatest of these is love.

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. . .

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

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.

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.