Quotes by Mary Stewart

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

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

“Used every man according to his capacity.”

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

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

“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, ...”

“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...”

“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 ...”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.”

“Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted”

“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…”

“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, mi...”

“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 ...”

“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 stil...”

“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. ...”

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

“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 af...”