“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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“My salad days
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then!”
― William Shakespeare, quote from Antony and Cleopatra
“Whether Neil left today or tomorrow or next week, he'd leave alone. Two, five, ten years from now, if Neil was even still alive, he'd still be alone. He could be anyone, anywhere in the world, but he'd be alone until the day he died. He'd never trust anyone enough to let them in.”
― Nora Sakavic, quote from The Foxhole Court
“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
― Tobias Wolff, quote from This Boy's Life
“Ian saw the tears shimmering in her magnificent eyes and one of them traced unheeded down her smooth cheek.
With a raw ache in his voice he said, "If you would take one step forward, darling, you could cry in my arms. And while you do, I'll tell you how sorry I am for everything I've done - " Unable to wait, Ian caught her, pulling her tightly against him. "And when I'm finished," he whispered hoarsely as she wrapped her arms around him and wept brokenly, "you can help me find a way to forgive myself."
Tortured by her tears, he clasped her tighter and rubbed his jaw against her temple, his voice a ravaged whisper: "I'm sorry," he told her. He cupped her face between his palms, tipping it up and gazing into her eyes, his thumbs moving over her wet cheeks. "I'm sorry." Slowly, he bent his head, covering her mouth with his. "I'm so damned sorry.”
― Judith McNaught, quote from Almost Heaven
“All we can hope for is that he will fall into the ocean with a bar of soap in his pocket.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from Airman
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