Top 91 Mary Stewart Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.
Mary Stewart
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.
Mary Stewart
#9. Kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.
Mary Stewart
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.
Mary Stewart
#14. 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
#15. Only a child expects life to be just; it's a man's part to stand by the consequences of his deeds.
Mary Stewart
#16. 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
#17. Someone's got to look after the devil himself, as long as he wears clothes and needs food and drink.
Mary Stewart
#18. All that we have is to live what life brings. Die what death comes.
Mary Stewart
#19. 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
#20. It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.
Mary Stewart
#21. Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees.
Mary Stewart
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.
Mary Stewart
#26. The sour smell was not the smell of fungus. It was unlit incense, and cold ashes, and unsaid prayers. I
Mary Stewart
#27. Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.
Mary Stewart
#28. Funny, one somehow imagines her snuffing quietly out now, the way the moon would if the sun vanished.
Mary Stewart
#29. The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.
Mary Stewart
#30. The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.
Mary Stewart
#31. The boredom and annoyance that shut down over it were humiliatingly plain to see. I could have slapped her for it.
Mary Stewart
#32. 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
#33. I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.
Mary Stewart
#34. 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
#35. So here at last were the first lines of the story that was later to come clear, a story of spite and bigotry, too mean and petty to be called tragedy, but tragic for all that.
Mary Stewart
#36. Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be
doing all the time.
Mary Stewart
#37. At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.
Mary Stewart
#38. I can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.
Mary Stewart
#39. 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
#40. The floss-silk manes tossed up like the crest of a breaking wave ... Light ran and glittered on them. They were obedient ... you would have sworn ... as the white horses of the wave crests are to pull of the moon.
Mary Stewart
#41. To expect and dread a thing for a lifetime; does not prepare you for the thing itself.
Mary Stewart
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.
Mary Stewart
#50. Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.
Mary Stewart
#51. You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.
Mary Stewart
#52. 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
#53. I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.
Mary Stewart
#54. The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.
Mary Stewart
#56. Something was moving; there was a kind of breathing brightness in the air, the wind of God brushing by, invisible in sunlight.
Mary Stewart
#57. 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
#58. I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.
Mary Stewart
#59. 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
#60. Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?
Mary Stewart
#61. Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.
Mary Stewart
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.
Mary Stewart
#65. Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.
Mary Stewart
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.
Mary Stewart
#70. A child thinks life is fair. A man stands by the consequences of his deeds.
Mary Stewart
#71. I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark.
Mary Stewart
#72. It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.
Mary Stewart
#73. The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult.
Mary Stewart
#74. Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted.
Mary Stewart
#76. The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try
Mary Stewart
#77. There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.
Mary Stewart
#78. 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
#79. Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding.
Mary Stewart
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. the god does not speak to those who have no time to listen.
Mary Stewart
#84. It is for you to choose. Choice is man's right, and for that I leave you free.
Mary Stewart
#85. 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
#86. Damn it, the tiger played velvet paws with me, didn't he?
Mary Stewart
#87. The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.
Mary Stewart
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. If anyone was to perform the classic folly of taking a midnight stroll among the murderous gentlemen with whom the hotel was probably packed, it was not going to be me.
Mary Stewart
#91. 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
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