Top 37 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Stewart

I can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.

The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.

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

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

It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.

To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

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.

I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark

I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.

Have you ever thought, when something dreadful happens, 'a moment ago things were not like this; let it be then, not now, anything but now'? And you try and try to remake then, but you know you can't. So you try to hold the moment quite still and not let it move on and show itself.

Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?

You never know how you'll turn out till you've been down to half a dollar and no prospects.

The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.

There are such people, unfortunates who have to be angry before they can feel alive. I had sometimes wondered if it were some old relic of pagan superstition, the fear of risking the jealousy and anger of the gods, that made such people afraid of even small happinesses. Or perhaps it was only that tragedy is more self-important than laughter.

The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.

I sometimes think it's a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.

the difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.

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.

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 again

I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.

Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.

Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.

Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees.

It is not true that women cannot keep secrets. Where they love, they can be trusted to death and beyond, against all sense and reason. It is their weakness, and their great strength.

But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power, that they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.

It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.

I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.

...the floss-silk manes tossed up like the crest of a breaking wave....Light ran and glittered on them. They were obedient...you would have sworn...as the white horses of the wave crests are to pull of the moon.

Perhaps loneliness had nothing to do with place or circumstance; perhaps it was in you; yourself. Perhaps, wherever you were, you took your little circle of loneliness with you.

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

Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.

It seems to me you can be awfully happy in this life if you stand aside and watch and mind your own business, and let other people do as they like about damaging themselves and one another. You go on kidding yourself that you're impartial and tolerant and all that, then all of a sudden you realize you're dead, and you've never been alive at all.

Folks will say anything, and next time round they'll believe it.