Mary Stewart > Quotes

“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, The Hollow Hills

“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, The Hollow Hills

“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, The Stormy Petrel

“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, Nine Coaches Waiting

“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”
― Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills

“The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.”
― Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave

“The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try”
― Mary Stewart, The Last Enchantment

“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, The Crystal Cave

“It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.”
― Mary Stewart, Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy

“I am nothing, yes; I am air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. But out there in the light I have a young king and a bright sword to do my work for me, and build what will stand when my name is only a word for forgotten songs and outworn wisdom, and when your name, Morgause, is only a hissing in the dark.”
― Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills

“I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.”
― Mary Stewart, My Brother Michael

“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, The Hollow Hills

“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....”
― Mary Stewart, The Moon-Spinners

“I think there is only one. Oh, there are gods everywhere, in the hollow hills, in the wind and the sea, in the very grass we walk on and the air we breathe, and in the bloodstained shadows where men like Belasius wait for them. But I believe there must be one who is God Himself, like the great sea, and all the rest of us, small gods and men and all, like rivers, we all come to Him in the end.”
― Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave

“To expect and dread a thing for a lifetime; does not prepare you for the thing itself.”
― Mary Stewart, Mary Stewart's Merlin Trilogy

“I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.”
― Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting

“The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.”
― Mary Stewart

“Nothing ever happens to me.”
― Mary Stewart, My Brother Michael

“I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.”
― Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting

“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, The Crystal Cave

“I'd live with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there... one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it - but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn't quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins... the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the stockings-to-wash, the tin soldier...”
― Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting

“Press on, regardless.”
― Mary Stewart, The Moon-Spinners

“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, The Ivy Tree

“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, Thornyhold

“At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.”
― Mary Stewart, Madam, Will You Talk?

“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, Thornyhold

“A good house, deep in the woods, with a garden all around it and a river flowing past it. Fruit trees, and flowers planted for the bees. A place to grow my herbs. Silence in winter, and in summer nothing but the birds. Lonely as the grave, and every bit as restful.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“...kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.”
― Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting

“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, Wildfire at Midnight

“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, My Brother Michael