Mary Renault > Quotes

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“True friends share everything, except the past before they met.”
― mary renault, Fire from Heaven

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.”
― Mary Renault, The King Must Die

“The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.”
― Mary Renault

“One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“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.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“To hate excellence is to hate the gods.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“Do not believe that others will die, not you.... I have wrestled with Thanatos knee to knee and I know how death is vanquished. Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.”
― Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo

“What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies”
― Mary Renault, The Bull from the Sea

“At the stair-foot Hephaistion was waiting. He happened to be there, as he happened to have a ball handy if Alexander wanted a game, or water if he was thirsty; not by calculation, but in a constant awareness by which no smallest trifle was missed. Now, when he came down the stairs with a shut mouth and blue lines under his eyes, Hephaistion received some mute signal he understood, and fell into step beside him.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.”
― Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

“(Alexander)'Sometimes I forget all this for months on end. Sometimes I think of it day and night. Sometimes I think, unless I find out the truth of it, I shall go mad.'
(Hephaistion)'That's stupid. You've got me now. Do you think I'd let you go mad?”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“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.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change whenever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas' palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“The school discussed friendship often. It is, they learned, one of the things man can least afford to lack; necessary to the good life, and beautiful in itself. Between friends is no need of justice, for neither wrong nor inequality can exist... Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.”
― Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

“He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer