Lucia > Lucia's Quotes

“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

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

“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

“The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.”
― 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, The King Must Die

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.”
― 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

“To hate excellence is to hate the gods.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.”
― Mary Renault

“(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

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

“You cannot step twice into the same river, said Herakleitos. People in the past were not just like us; to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal, turning our back on them so as to be easy among familiar things.”
― Mary Renault

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack

“Never hide things from hardcore thinkers. They get more aggravated, more provoked by confusion than the most painful truths.”
― Criss Jami

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind