Mary Renault Quotes.

1. "The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes."
- Quote by Mary Renault

2. "Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart."
- Quote by Mary Renault

3. "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."
- Quote by Mary Renault

4. "Don't talk so, Lysis. I'm sure you kept your head much better than I did." He smiled, and quoted a certain phrase, recalling a personal matter between us. Then he said, "Am I getting old, to find myself always thinking, 'Last year was better'?"-"Sometimes it seems to me, Lysis, that nothing has been the same since the Games."-"We think so, my dear, because that was our concern. If you asked that potter over there, or that old soldier, or Kallippides the actor, each would name his own Isthmia, I daresay... It has been a long war, Alexias. Twenty-four years now. Even Troy was only ten."
- Quote by Mary Renault

5. "A starving man won't notice a dirty plate."
- Quote by Mary Renault

6. "With a cold barren weariness that quenched the dry glow of anger, he thought, What can you do about these people? The terrible thing is, there are such a lot of them. There are so many, they expect to meet each other wherever they go. Not wicked, he thought: that’s not the word, that’s sentimentality. These are just runts. Souls with congenitally short necks and receding brows. They don’t sin in the sight of heaven and feel despair: they only throw away lighted cigarettes on Exmoor, and go on holiday leaving the cat to starve, and drive on after accidents without stopping. A wicked man nowadays can set millions of them in motion, and when he’s gone howling mad from looking at his own face, they’ll be marching still with their mouths open and their hands hanging by their knees, on and on and on. …"
- Quote by Mary Renault

7. "All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy-and that is as well, for one could not bear it-whose grief is that the principals never met."
- Quote by Mary Renault

8. "There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it."
- Quote by Mary Renault

9. "As i was beginning to understand, this kind of love was foreign ground to him. I may add that he never did, as far as I know, accept a suitor.... Sometimes indeed I asked myself whether he lacked the capacity for loving men at all; but I liked him too well to offend him by such a question."
- Quote by Mary Renault

10. "the maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood."
- Mary Renault, The Novels of Alexander Great: Fire from Heaven