“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a King.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“To hate excellence is to hate the gods.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Alexander, of whom men tell many legends, lived by his own. Achilles must have Patroklos. He might love his Briseis; but Patroklos was the friend till death. At their tombs in Troy, Alexander and Hephaistion had sacrificed together. Wound Patroklos, and Achilles will have your blood.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“It is something, I thought, when a king can put a courtesan to the blush.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Never mind, mother, you weren’t far out; he is Alexander too.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“That there are fashions in admiration and denigration is inevitable; they should not however be followed at the expense of truth.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“I doubt he’d ever in his life lain down with anyone for whom he had not felt some kind of fondness. He needed love as a palm tree needs water, all his life long: from armies, from cities, from conquered enemies, nothing was enough. It laid him open to false friends, as anyone will tell you. Well, for all that, no man is made a god when he is dead and can do no harm, without love. He needed love and never forgave its betrayal, which he had no understanding of. For he himself, if it was given him with a whole heart, never misused it, nor despised the giver. He took it gratefully, and felt bound by it.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Great anguish lies in wait for those who long too greatly.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“People like me are blamed for curiosity; having lost part of our lives, we are apt to fill the gap from the lives of others. In this I am like the rest, and make no pretences.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“When we were up in the hills, he took me for an early ride, to taste, as he said, the clean air of Persia once again. I breathed it and said, “Al’skander, we are home.” “Truly. I too.” He looked towards the folded ranges, whose peaks had had the first snowfalls. “I’d say this only to you; shut it in your heart. Macedon was my father’s country. This is mine.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Am I beautiful? It is for you alone. Say that you love me, for without you I cannot live.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“I said, 'We have dreamed, dear friend. Another time, we might awaken. Let it be a dream forgotten at morning.' That seemed a better way of saying it than, 'Never remind me of this, for fear I should stick a knife in you.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“If anyone has the right to be measured by the standards of his own time, it is Alexander. Hermann Bengston, The Greeks and the Persians”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that. How many have tried, because of him? Not only those I have seen; there will be men to come. Those who look in mankind only for their own littleness, and make them believe in that, kill more than he ever will in all his wars.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“Do I grudge my lord the herb that will heal him, because another gathers it? No, let him be healed.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“All these years you have made a boy of him. But with me, he shall be a man”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
“They say women forget the pain of childbirth. Well, they are in nature's hand. No hand took mine. I was a body of pain in an earth and sky of darkness. It will take death to make me forget.”
― Mary Renault, quote from The Persian Boy
Mary Renault
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date September 4, 1905
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“Matthew had called her harmless. Harmless. And being with him made Frankie feel squashed into a box - a box where she was expected to be sweet and sensitive (but not oversensitive); a box for young and pretty girls who were not as bright or as powerful as their boyfriends. A box for people who were not forces to be reckoned with.
Frankie wanted to be a force.”
― E. Lockhart, quote from The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
“Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded.”
― China Miéville, quote from Embassytown
“I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do.
It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.”
― Daniel H. Wilson, quote from Robopocalypse
“Maybe he does show himself to us, but we don’t see. Maybe it’s not our senses that are the problem, but our minds.”
― Ted Dekker, quote from The Complete Circle Series
“...to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in traveling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad.”
― W.G. Sebald, quote from Austerlitz (Penguin Essentials)
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The Probability of V...BookQuoters 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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