Quotes from The Hollow Hills

“Every life has death and every light has shadow. Be content to stand in the light and let the shadow fall where it will.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“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. ”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“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”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“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…”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I am nothing, yes; I am air and darkness, a word, a promise. I watch in the crystal and I wait in the hollow hills. But out there in the light I have a young king and a bright sword to do my work for me, and build what will stand when my name is only a word for forgotten songs and outworn wisdom, and when your name, Morgause, is only a hissing in the dark.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“A child thinks life is fair. A man stands by the consequences of his deeds.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“Only a child expects life to be just; it's a man's part to stand by the consequences of his deeds.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“In the morning it was fine, with one of those glittering sharp days that December sometimes throws down like bright gold among the lead of winter's coinage.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“Something was moving; there was a kind of breathing brightness in the air, the wind of God brushing by, invisible in sunlight.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“the smell of resin filled the air. A thrush was singing somewhere. Late harebells were thick among the grass, and small blue butterflies moved over the white flowers of the blackberry. There was a hive of wild bees under the roof of the chapel; their humming filled the air, the sound of summer’s end. Through”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I lay wakeful, watching the empty dark, listening to the little wind which had sprung up throwing handfuls of rain against the walls of the tent,”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“Then quiet, but clear as a shout, the King called, ‘Here!’ and flung his own sword, hilt first, into the air. Arthur’s hand shot out and caught it by the hilt. I saw it catch the light. The white horse reared again. The standard was up, and streaming in the wind, scarlet on gold. There was a great shout, spreading out from the centre of the field where the white stallion, treading blood, leapt forward under the Dragon banner. Shouting, the men surged with him. I saw the standardbearer hesitate fractionally, looking back at the King, but the King waved him forward, then lay back, smiling, in his chair. And”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I was back on the scented hillside with the moon coming out above the ruins of the temple where nothing remains now of the Goddess but her night-owls brooding. So”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“and behind the stone the faint drifting of the stars that is not movement, but the heavens breathing. Still”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“There, below the cliffs, is a bay of sand where the rocks stand up like the fangs of wolves, and no boat or swimmer can live when the tide is breaking round them. To right and left of the bay the sea has driven arches through the cliff. The rocks are purple and rose-coloured and pale as turquoise in the sun, and on a summer’s evening when the tide is low and the sun is sinking, men see on the horizon land that comes and goes with the light. It is the Summer Isle, which (they say) floats and sinks at the will of heaven, the Island of Glass through which the clouds and stars can be seen, but which for those who dwell there is full of trees and grass and springs of sweet water . . .’ The”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“a dream half-waking, broken and uneasy, of the small gods of small places; gods of hills and woods and streams and crossways; the gods who still haunt their broken shrines, waiting in the dusk beyond the lights of the busy Christian churches, and the dogged rituals of the greater gods of Rome.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“The Romans gave them Roman names, and let them be; but the Christians refuse to believe in them, and their priests berate the poorer folk for clinging to the old ways—and no doubt for wasting offerings which would do better at some hermit’s cell than at some ancient holy place in the forest. But still the simple folk creep out to leave their offerings, and when these vanish by morning, who is to say that a god has not taken them? This,”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I saw it begin; even so, after battle, Ambrosious' very presence had give the wounded strength and the dying comfort. Whatever it was he had had about him, Arthur had the same; I was to see it often in the future; it seemed that he shed brightness and strength round him where he went, and still had it ever renewed in himself. As he grew older, I knew it would be renewed more hardly and at a cost, but now he was very young, with the flower of manhood still to come. After this, I thought, who could maintain that youth itself made him unfit for kingship? Not Lot, stiffened in his ambition, grimly scheming for a dead king's throne. It was Arthur's very youth which had whistled up today the best that men had in them, as a huntsman calls up the following back, or an enchanter whistles up the wind.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I doubt if any son every knew more about his father and his father's father than I, with all you have told me; but telling is not the same. There was alot of knowing to make up.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“this might be a beauty to send men mad. Her body was slight with a child’s slenderness, but her breasts were full and pointed and her throat round as a lily stem. Her hair was rosy gold, streaming long and unbound over the golden-green robe. The large eyes that I remembered were gold-green too, liquid and clear as a stream running over mosses, and the small mouth lifted into a smile over kitten’s teeth”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“I had been so used to God's voice in the fire and stars that I had forgotten to listen for it in the counsels of men.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

“The sour smell was not the smell of fungus. It was unlit incense, and cold ashes, and unsaid prayers. I”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Hollow Hills

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Popular quotes

“Bei diesem unbedachten Wort sah ich plötzlich den armen Lahmen vor mir, flehend und leidend, ihn, den wir nicht liebten, den wir loszuwerden trachteten und
der jetzt von uns verlassen und eingeschlossen einsam und traurig in der dämmernden Stube saß. Es fiel mir ein, daß es nun bald zu dunkeln beginnen müsse
und daß er nicht im stande sein würde, Licht zu machen oder dem Fenster näher
zu rücken. Also würde er das Buch weglegen und im Halbdunkel allein sitzen müssen, ohne Gespräch oder Zeitvertreib, indes wir hier Wein tranken, lachten und uns
vergnügten. Und es fiel mir ein, wie ich den Nachbarn in Assisi vom heiligen Franz
erzählt hatte und wie ich geflunkert hatte, er hätte mich gelehrt alle Menschen liebzuhaben. Wozu hatte ich das Leben des Heiligen studiert und seinen herrlichen
Gesang der Liebe auswendig gelernt und seine Spuren auf den umbrischen Hügeln
gesucht, wenn nun ein armer und hülfloser Mensch dalag und leiden mußte, während ich davon wußte und ihn trösten konnte?”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Peter Camenzind

“Vic didn’t mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else.”
― Patricia Highsmith, quote from Deep Water

“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves

“The exact science of human regeneration is the Lost Key of Masonry, for when the Spirit Fire is lifted up through the thirty-three degrees, or segments of the spinal column, and enters into the domed chamber of the human skull, it finally passes into the pituitary body (Isis), where it invokes Ra (the pineal gland) and demands the Sacred Name.”
― David Wilcock, quote from The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies

“we could see manmade things. Colony things.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Half Way Home

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