Best 59 quotes of Mary Stewart on MyQuotes

But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power, that they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.

Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.

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.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.

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.

I can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.

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.

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.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark

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.

I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.

It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.

It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.

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.

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all.

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.

Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.

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.

The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try

...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.

The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

There are such people, unfortunates who have to be angry before they can feel alive. I had sometimes wondered if it were some old relic of pagan superstition, the fear of risking the jealousy and anger of the gods, that made such people afraid of even small happinesses. Or perhaps it was only that tragedy is more self-important than laughter.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

Arthur thought it better to make sure that the scattered Saxon forces could not re-form, at least while he came south for his father's burial." "He is young,"she said, "for such a charge." I smiled. "But ready for it, and more than able. Believe me, it was like seeing a young falcon take to the air, or a swan to the water.

At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.

But, as a form of exercise, I cannot recommend carrying a suitcase for a mile or so along sand and shingle at the dead of night, and then edging one's way along a narrow path where a false step will mean plunging into a couple of fathoms of sea that, however quiet, is toothed like a shark with jagged fangs of rock.

By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.

Count Ambrosius was out of practice at chess. The usual game was dice, and he was not risking that against an infant soothsayer. Chess, being a matter of mathematics rather than magic, was less susceptible to the black arts.' --twelve-year-old Merlin, The Crystal Cave, p. 131 of 384

—¿Dios? ¿Dios? Te he oído hablar de muchos dioses. Si te refieres a Mitra... —Mitra, Apolo, Arturo, Cristo, llámalo como quieras —dije—. ¿Qué importa el nombre que le den los hombres? Es la misma luz, y los hombres deben vivir con esta luz o morir. Yo sólo sé que Dios es la fuente de toda la luz que ilumina la tierra y que su designio está en todo el mundo y pasa por cada hombre como un gran río que no podemos detener ni desviar; solo podemos beber de él mientras vivimos y encomendar nuestros cuerpos en él cuando morimos.

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

Happiness changes as you change. It's in yourself.

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. - Nine Coaches Waiting

His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. 'You were prepared to take chances - once.' 'Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge - my duty.' The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. 'I - I was all he had. Besides that, it couldn't be allowed to matter.' 'What couldn't.' 'That you were all I had.

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. . .

I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us - to us of the West. We've learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It's given us almost everything that our world has that is worthwhile. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It's our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country -- and Greece.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Rest you here, enchanter, while the light fades, Vision narrows, and the far Sky-edge is gone with the sun. Be content with the small spark Of the coal, the smell Of food, and the breath Of frost beyond the shut door. Home is here, and familiar things; A cup, a wooden bowl, a blanket, Prayer, a gift for the god, and sleep. (And music, says the harp, And music.) Rest here, enchanter, while the fire dies. In a breath, in an eyelid's fall, You will see them, the dreams; The sword and the young king, The white horse and the running water, The lit lamp and the boy smiling. Dreams, dreams, enchanter! Gone with the harp's echo when the strings Fall mute; with the flame's shadow when the fire Dies. Be still, and listen. Far on the black air Blows the great wind, rises The running tide, flows the clear river. Listen, enchanter, hear Through the black air and the singing air The music….

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.

Sometimes, when you're deep in the countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and on to these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like the moonlight. In fact, it is the moonlight, the moon itself, which is why they don't carry a distaff. They're not Fates, or anything terrible; they don't affect the lives of men; all they have to do is to see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grown on the spindles of the maidens. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest..... ...on the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, and there is the moon again, rising above the sea....Only when all the wool is washed, and wound again into a white ball in the sky, can the moon-spinners start their work once more....

The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult.