Mary Renault Quotes

The man who sleeps on a warning does not deserve one. What wait till tomorrow? I will go today?

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

...maybe his soul remembered. as we know. the ashes of Achilles and Patroklos were mingled in one urn. not even a god could sift the one from the other. Achilles has come back with his fierceness and his pride, and with Patroklos’ feeling. each of them suffered for what he was; this boy will suffer for both.

It was his nature to believe anything, before he would believe he could be wrong.

"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."

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

His feelings were confused; he wanted to grasp till Alexander's very bones were somehow engulfed within himself, but knew this to be wicked and mad; he would kill anyone who harmed a hair of his head.

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.

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.

Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.

Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes around the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long.

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.

There are always men who take their own measure against greatness, and hate it not for what it is, but for what they are. They can envy even the dead. So much Alexander saw. He did not understand, since it was not in him, the power such men have to rouse in others the sleeping envy they once had a decent shame of; to turn respect for excellence into hate. Nor did Kallisthenes understand it in himself. Vanity begets it, vanity covers it up.

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

So I came back to philosophy, but differently; feeling it in myself, and in those I met in talk, a fever of the blood. I had come to it as a boy from wonder at the visible world; to know the causes of things; and to feel the sinews of my mind, as one feels one’s muscles in the palaestra. But now we searched the nature of the universe, and our own souls, more like physicians in time of sickness.

It was not that we were in love with the past. We were of an age to feel the present our own, and to suppose it would never outstrip us. In painting and sculpture and verse, the names we grew passionate over looked to us as big as those of Perikles’ day, and it still half surprises me when I find them unknown to my sons. But we seldom stood to enjoy good work, as one stands before a fine view or a flower, in simple gladness that it is. As we hailed each new artist we grew angry with the former ones, as with false guides we had caught out; we hastened, though we knew not where. To freedom, we said; the sculptors no longer proportioned their forms by the Golden Number of Pythagoras, as Pheidias and Polykleitos did; and art would do great things, we said, now it had cast off its chains.