Top 15 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.

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.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

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

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.

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.

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.

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