Mary Stewart

“Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted”

“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 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.”

“Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.”

“It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.”

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

“Merlin, do you mind?' It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.”

“At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.”

“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…”

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

“Used every man according to his capacity.”

“The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.”

“Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.”