1
The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to tryMary Stewart
2
The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.Mary Stewart
3
Used every man according to his capacity.Mary Stewart
4
At breakfast! ' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.Mary Stewart
5
Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.Mary Stewart
6
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
7
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 againMary Stewart
8
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.Mary Stewart
9
There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.Mary Stewart
10
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.Mary Stewart
11
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.Mary Stewart
12
I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.Mary Stewart
13
Time spent looking back in anger is time wastedMary Stewart
14
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
15
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
16
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..Mary Stewart
17
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.Mary Stewart
18
Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.Mary Stewart
19
By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.Mary Stewart
20
I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.Mary Stewart
21
Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?Mary Stewart
22
...kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.Mary Stewart