After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. Furthermore, they had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. Furthermore, they had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.

— Mary Renault

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.

— Mary Renault

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

— Mary Renault

Each generation has its own dream of beauty. I have lived long enough to watch it change. Just then, he was what all sculptors were reaching after, and only the great achieved.

— Mary Renault

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, 'I am not afraid.

— Mary Renault

How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?

— Mary Renault

In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.

— Mary Renault

In hatred as in love we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe we graft into our very soul.

— Mary Renault

Is he weeping?" said the one with the softest heart.

— Mary Renault

It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

— Mary Renault