Mary Renault Quotes

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

True friends share everything, except the past before they met.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

The rightness of a thing isn't determined by the amount of courage it takes.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

I saw death come for you, and I had no philosophy.

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.

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.

It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

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

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.

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

In hatred is love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul.

What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies

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.

It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.

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.

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.

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.

He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.

I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.

It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they feel the black cold of chaos.

Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.

We shall either find what we are seeking, or free ourselves from the persuasion that we know what we do not know.

(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?

It is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting.

The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.

Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.

WITHOUT LAUGHTER, WHAT MAN of sense could endure either politics or war?

Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live.

Often I wished for someone to share my mind with; but their hearts were in little things, they would have thought me a dreamer, and I had to plan alone.

Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.

Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

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.

What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.

Men would be as gods, if they had foreknowledge.

People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.

All men seek esteem; the best by lifting themselves, which is hard to do, the rest by shoving others down, which is much easier.

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.

I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.

Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.

For I had felt too much and reasoned too little, hearing what I was ready to hear, not what had been said. There

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.

The school discussed friendship often. It is, they learned, one of the things man can least afford to lack; necessary to the good life, and beautiful in itself. Between friends is no need of justice, for neither wrong nor inequality can exist... Friendship is perfect when virtuous men love the good in one another; for virtue gives more delight than beauty, and is untouched by time.

Nothing will change, Alexias. No, that is false; there is change whenever there is life, and already we are not the two who met in Taureas' palaestra. But what kind of fool would plant an apple-slip, to cut it down at the season when the fruit is setting? Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain.

All these years you have made a boy of him. But with me, he shall be a man

I said, 'We have dreamed, dear friend. Another time, we might awaken. Let it be a dream forgotten at morning.' That seemed a better way of saying it than, 'Never remind me of this, for fear I should stick a knife in you.

I was a king and a king's heir and now I am a slave.

I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.

The world had broken; the pieces lay like shattered gold, spoil for the strongest.

Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Plato, in his opinion, had committed too much to love.

His mouth felt cold to mine ; he neither opened his eyes, nor spoke, nor moved. I said in my heart, "Too late I am here within your cloak, I who never of my own will would have denied you anything. Time and death and change are unforgiving, and love lost in the time of youth never returns again.

Change is the sum of the universe, and what is of nature ought not to be feared. But one gives it hostages, and lays one's grief upon the gods. Sokrates is free, and would have taught me freedom. But I have yoked the immortal horse that draws the chariot with a horse of earth; and when the one falls, both are entangled in the traces.

They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature's hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.

Do you know that old song about Orpheus, how he played his lyre on the mountainside, and found a lion had crouched at his feet to listen? I’m no Orpheus, I know; but sometimes I see the lion’s eyes. Where did it go, after the music, what became of it? The story doesn’t say.

Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, ‘Is it a queer book?’ ‘No,’ said Laurie. ‘Oh,’ said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.

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. How many have tried, because of him? Not only those I have seen; there will be men to come. Those who look in mankind only for their own littleness, and make them believe in that, kill more than he ever will in all his wars.

Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone's soul is always listening." Someone's always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

That is the life of the gods, who only seem to die like the sun at his setting. But do not ride too fast across the sky and leave us all in darkness.

What is democracy, Lysis?”—“It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal. - Herakles

There is truth and truth,’ said the priest of Delos. ‘It is true after its kind.

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.

That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.

you’ll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn’t have it.

...temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin.

It is a grief to see a hero go down to the house of Hades. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Then an unjust democracy must be worse than an unjust oligarchy, mustn’t it?

the maxim of the famous Spartan nurses: never expose a small child to fear, let him enter confidently on boyhood.

May the Mother curse him and all gods below, and may Night's Daughters hunt him down into the ground! And on the hand that sheds his blood let there be a blessing.

I doubt he’d ever in his life lain down with anyone for whom he had not felt some kind of fondness. He needed love as a palm tree needs water, all his life long: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough. It laid him open to false friends, as anyone will tell you. Well, for all that, no man is made a god when he is dead and can do no harm, without love. He needed love and never forgave its betrayal, which he had no understanding of. For he himself, if it was given him with a whole heart, never misused it, nor despised the giver. He took it gratefully, and felt bound by it.

She stood laughing in the water. Her laughter made my backbone ripple. It had neither shame nor shamelessness; she laughed alone, please with her victory over strange monstrous things.

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.

In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretence of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.

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.

Men are not born equal in themselves, so I think it beneath a man to postulate that they are. If I thought myself as good as Sokrates I should be a fool; and if, not really believing it, I asked you to make me happy by assuring me of it, you would rightly despise me. So why should I insult my fellow-citizens by treating them as fools and cowards? A man who thinks himself as good as everyone else will be at no pains to grow better. On the other hand, I might think myself as good as Sokrates, and even persuade other fools to agree with me; but under a democracy, Sokrates is there in the Agora to prove me wrong. I want a city where I can find my equals and respect my betters, whoever they are; and where no one can tell me to swallow a lie because it is expedient, or some other man's will.

You wished for me, Athenians; I am here. Do not question me, do not hurt me; I am the wish sprung from your heart, and if you wound me your heart will bleed for it. Your love made me. Do not take it away; for without love I am a temple forsaken by its god, where dark Alastor will enter. It was you, Athenians, who conjured me, a daimon whose food is love. Feed me, then, and I will clothe you with glory, and show you to yourselves in the image of your desire. I am hungry: feed me. It is too late to repent.

I looked at him, tipping down the coarse wine like a man who expects to put up with worse. I felt I was looking my last at the lad I still remembered. I was right. When I saw him again, it was five years later, and not in Athens. He was tanned like the thong of a javelin, and as tough as the shaft, a soldier who looked to have been cradled in a shield; but the oddest change, I think, was to see in one always so mindful of convention that careless outlandishness you find in irregular troops of great renown; men who seem to say, "Take it or leave it, you who never went where we have been. We are the only judges of one another.

We started off, he and I, and the girl between us. She shivered as the cold struck her; he pulled the sheepskins higher, and put his arm with a fold of his cloak about her shoulders. I felt a sudden rush of the past upon me; for a moment grief pierced me like a winter night; yet it came to me like an old grief, I had suffered it long since and now it was behind me.

Presently, he looked at the people standing round and said, "You have leave to go." They bowed out. When the lads behind him started to follow, he reached out and caught one by the arm, saying, "No, you stay, Hephaistion." The tall boy came back with a lightening of all his face, and stood close beside him. He said to me, "The others are the Companions of the Prince; but we two are just Hephaistion and Alexander." "So it was" I said, smiling at them, "in the tent of Achilles". He nodded; it was a thought he was used to.

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.

Go in peace," I said to him; "bear no ill-will to me, for Necessity yields to no man: and do not complain of me to our mother, for her blood is on your head as well as mine. If the gods had not forbidden it, my brother, I would put you to sleep before I left you, for night comes on; this is an empty place, and the clouds look dark upon the mountains. But the blood of kindred is not to be washed away; and when a man has once felt the breath of the Honoured Ones upon his neck, he will not bid them across the threshold. So forgive me, and suffer what must be. The clouds are heavy; if the gods love you, before morning there will be snow.

Men are seldom helpless against their own evil wishes, and in their souls they know it. But common men love flattery not less than tyrants, if anyone will sell it to them. If they are told that the struggle for the good is an illusion, that no one need be ashamed to drop his shield and run, that the coward is the natural man, the hero is fable, many will be grateful. But will the city, or mankind, be better?’ No being a sophist, trained to bring out answers pat, I could only say, 'But it’s such marvelous theater.

Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting-place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle, and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.

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. …