Mary Renault Quotes

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.

Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

- Herakles

"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."

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

A starving man won't notice a dirty plate.

"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."

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.

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