Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Marion Zimmer Bradley

I never thought that I was very intelligent.

My husband and I were very in love, and I had no reason to suspect that his interests lay anywhere else.

The scandal's so unbelievable that I cannot repeat it here.

A babe at the breast is as much pleasure as the bearing is pain.

He used to sit on my lap. I was sort of ambivalent about that. He was surviving any way he could.

On one occasion I shared a bed with about seven other people, but we were all having a party overnight.

A friend of ours has a hobby doing genealogy, and we found out that we were cousins in the ninth degree, that we had a common ancestor on the Mayflower.

Science fiction encourages us to explore... all the futures, good and bad, that the human mind can envision.

It has never been, and never will be easy work! But the road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

I do tend to lose track since the kids are out of school.

I've been a schoolteacher. I always try to get the kids to finish talking before the next one starts.

I wasn't a child at 13, were you?

We were discussing civilization and the fact that young men among the Greeks at that time were idiots and uneducated, so the men had emotional and friendly relationships with members of their own sex.

No man or woman can live another's fate

A woman is never free to bear a child unless she is also free to abort it.

The older I grow the more I become certain that it makes no difference what words we use to tell the same truths.

The visible world was only an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, which the Philosopher sought to transcend.

From these Christians who came to [Avalon] to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter's son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.

There are ignorant priests and ignorant people, who are all too ready to cry sorcery if a woman is only a little wiser than they are!

All the tears women shed, they leave no mark on the world.

Speak not against anyone whose burden you have not weighed yourself.

If you listen to dogs barking you will go deaf without learning anything.

Some knowledge and some song and some beauty must be kept for those days before the world again plunges into darkness.

Never name the well from which you will not drink.

I never left you; I never will leave you. While life lasts, and beyond, I am here.

If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time serving it.

Morgaine laughed and mocked, but when it was a real trouble, no one could be kinder.

There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.

A priestess of Avalon does not lie. But I am cast out of Avalon, and for this, and unless it is all to be for nothing, I must lie, and lie well and quickly

Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you.

Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.

I should know, for I am Morgaine le Fay, priestess of the Isle of Avalon, where the ancient religion of the Mother Goddess is born.

Without a dream to light your way, the world is a very dark place.

Magic is a matter of focusing the disciplined will. But sometimes the will must be abandoned. The secret lies in knowing when to exercise control, and when to let go.

I have called on the Goddess and found her within myself

The Goddess does not shower her gifts on those who reject them.

What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control. But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control. If you feel powerless over your fear, you have not yet admitted that it is yours, to do with as you will.

I think too many people presume to read the divine Scriptures and fall into such terrors as this,' said Patricius sternly. 'Those who presume on their learning will learn, I trust, to listen to their priests for the true interpretations.' The Merlin smiled gently. 'I cannot join you in that wish, brother. I am dedicated to the belief that it is God's will that all men should strive for wisdom in themselves, not look to it from some other. Babes, perhaps, must have their food chewed for them by a nurse, but men may drink and eat of wisdom for themselves.

If you would have the message of the gods to direct your life, look for that which repeats ... It comes again and again until you have made it part of your soul and your enduring spirit.

Darling, I wish I could help you. Try to remember this: to live, you need every experience. Some will come in glory and in beauty, and some in pain and what seems like ugliness. But - they are. Life consists of opposites in balance.

[T]he House of Maidens was for little girls whose whole duty in life was to spill things, break things, and forget things . . . until they had spilled, broken, and forgotten everything they could, and thus made room in their lives for a little wisdom.

Arthur, their young king, like a hero out of legend.

I am dedicated to the belief that it is God's will that all men should strive for wisdom in themselves, not look to it from some other. Babes, perhaps, must have their food chewed for them by a nurse, but men may drink and eat of wisdom for themselves.

Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became.

One of the earliest lessons I learned was not to read my reviews. Weigh them.

For there is no higher religion than the Truth.

There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day—bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.

Beware what you speak,' said the Merlin very softly, 'for indeed the words we speak make shadows of what is to come, and by speaking them we bring them to pass, my king.

Love is the only prayer I know.

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

By what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.

What wise God would consign a man to Hell for ignorance, instead of teaching him better in the afterlife?

There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever.

... but I believe the divine ones will send other great masters to preach the truth to mankind, and that mankind will always receive them with the cross and the fire and the stones

I cannot regret it. They tell us in the temple that true joy is found only in freedom from the Wheel that is death and rebirth, that we must come to despise earthly joy and suffering, and long only for the peace of the presence of the eternal. Yet I love this life on Earth, Morgan, and I love you with a love that is stronger than death, and if sin is the price of binding us together, life after life across the ages, then I will sin joyfully and without regret, so that it brings me back to you, my beloved!

And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference.

To know you are ignorant is the beginning of wisdom.

Flowers and fruit are only the beginning. In the seed lies the life and the future.

All gods are one god.

On one occasion I shared a bed with about seven other people, but we were all having a party overnight