“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...”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I'd live with loneliness a long time. That was something which was always there... one learns to keep it at bay, there are times when one even enjoys it - but there are also times when a desperate self-sufficiency doesn't quite suffice, and then the search for the anodyne begins... the radio, the dog, the shampoo, the stockings-to-wash, the tin soldier...”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“...kissing me with a violence that was terrifying and yet, somehow, the summit of all my tenderest dreams.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“There was one thing that stood like stone among the music and moonfroth of the evening's gaieties. It was stupid, it was terrifying, it was wonderful, but it had happened and I could do nothing about it. For better or worse, I was head over ears in love...”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I remember thinking with a queer detached portion of my mind that here was someone wringing her hands. One reads about it and one never sees it, and now here it was.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“By the time that adorable steak and I had become one flesh I could have taken on the whole Valmy clan singlehanded.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“The street lamps glowed like ripe oranges among the bare boughs. Below in the wet street their globes glimmered down and down, to drown in their own reflections.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“The car whispered up the slope and nosed quietly out above the trees. He was driving like a careful insult.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“Damn it, the tiger played velvet paws with me, didn't he?”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“Funny, one somehow imagines her snuffing quietly out now, the way the moon would if the sun vanished.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“I'd settle for what you had to give”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“One always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“It was as if the past, till then so longed after, so lived over, had slipped off my shoulders like a burden. The future was still hidden, somewhere in the lights that made a yellow blur in the sky beyond the end of the dark street. Here between the two I waited, and for the first time saw both clearly.... I had made myself a stranger in England, not only bereaved, but miserably dépaysée, drifting with no clear aim, resenting the life I had been thrust into with such tragic brutality; I had refused to adapt myself to it and make myself a place there, behaving like the spoiled child who, because he cannot have the best cake, refuses to eat at all. I had waited for life to offer itself back to me on the old terms. Well, it wasn't going to.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“The boredom and annoyance that shut down over it were humiliatingly plain to see. I could have slapped her for it.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“His voice was quite flat, dull, almost. 'You were prepared to take chances - once.'
'Myself, yes. But this was Philippe. I had no right to take a chance on Philippe. I didn't dare. He was my charge - my duty.' The miserable words sounded priggish and unutterably absurd. 'I - I was all he had. Besides that, it couldn't be allowed to matter.'
'What couldn't.'
'That you were all I had.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
“to talk to Léon about it, I can see”
― Mary Stewart, quote from Nine Coaches Waiting
Mary Stewart
Born place: in Sunderland, The United Kingdom
Born date September 12, 1916
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“La gloire ne peut apporter de joie à qui l'a volée: elle ne fait palpiter que les cœurs dignes d'elle.”
― Nikolai Gogol, quote from Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
“We kissed all the way through the fireworks display. We didn’t even notice that there was a fireworks display… …I guess because we’d been making fireworks of our own.”
― Meg Cabot, quote from Teen Idol
“Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?”
― Karen Thompson Walker, quote from The Age of Miracles
“Because I know I will never love anyone like I love you. That’s what will overcome the past every time it tries to rear its ugly head.” He stepped closer. “So it’s either you and me or me and me, Luce. And I don’t really like myself, so I hope you’ll pick the you and me option.”
― Nicole Williams, quote from Crash
“He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato
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CourageousBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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