Mary Renault Quotes

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

~ Mary Renault

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

Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.

~ Mary Renault

Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.

~ Mary Renault

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

~ Mary Renault

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

~ Mary Renault

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.

~ Mary Renault

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

~ Mary Renault

People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.

~ Mary Renault

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

~ Mary Renault

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

~ Mary Renault

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

~ Mary Renault

There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.

~ Mary Renault

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

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

Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.

~ Mary Renault

It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.

~ Mary Renault

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

~ Mary Renault

What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.

~ Mary Renault

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

~ Mary Renault

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

~ Mary Renault

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

~ Mary Renault