Mary Stewart Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

...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.