Top 40 Margaret George Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The cure for a broken heart is simple, my lady. A hot bath and a good night’s sleep.”

— Margaret George

2. “The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses.”

— Margaret George

3. “You must bear losses like a soldier, the voice told me, bravely and without complaint, and just when the day seems lost, grab your shield for another stand, another thrust forward. That is the juncture that separates heroes from the merely strong.”

— Margaret George

4. “I thought of the “Roman way” of impaling oneself on a sword. Certainly poison seemed more civilized. And I thought the Romans were a little too eager to commit suicide. It did not take much of a setback before they were reaching for their swords, or opening their veins.”

— Margaret George

5. “Things do not happen, we must make them happen.”

— Margaret George

6. “What is one person’s diversion may be another’s supreme test.”

— Margaret George

7. “So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.”

— Margaret George

8. “Hope is a straw hat hanging beside a window covered with frost.”

— Margaret George

9. “Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.”

— Margaret George

10. “What is one person’s diversion may be another’s supreme test. And so often we sit beside one another, unknowing.”

— Margaret George

11. “Life as a whole is not happy. Only moments. This is my moment. It will pass.”

— Margaret George

12. “Gaul was brought to shame by Caesar; By King Nicomedes, he. Here comes Caesar, wreathed in triumph For his Gallic victory! Nicomedes wears no laurels, Though the greatest of the three.”

— Margaret George

13. “Kindness is stronger than iron bars.”

— Margaret George

14. “I will even not rant about treachery. I was brought up in a sea of treachery and deceit and betrayal. I swam in it like perch in the Nile. I am completely at home in it. I shall not drown.”

— Margaret George

15. “Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass – the earth – into the second – eternity.”

— Margaret George

16. “The age of heroes had truly passed, and Tisamenus could not be one even if he burned for it. A great bronze wall had been erected around those old heroes, it descended from the sky, and no one could lift it or trespass there. Each age bestowed its own glory, but the age of my grandson could not be the age of Menelaus.”

— Margaret George

17. “There is no respect for hidden music.”

— Margaret George

18. “Defeat I can endure with cheerfulness, my lady. But betrayal is like taking the wind from my sails, or the earth from beneath my feet. It chills my spirits like a rainy day, and all I can do is draw the curtains and cry into my pillow.”

— Margaret George

19. “Some things can be recovered. Some things can be restored. But some lost things, we seek forever.”

— Margaret George

20. “It is only when our fate hangs in the balance, when our very life depends on something, that we see whether or not we trust that the rope to which we are clinging will support us. If we do not, then we let of of the ledge and swing on it with our full weight.”

— Margaret George

21. “It is almost impossible to describe happiness, because at the time it feels entirely natural, as if all the rest of your life has been the aberration; only in retrospect does it swim into focus as the rare and precious thing it is. When it is present, it seems to be eternal, abiding forever, and there is no need to examine it or clutch it. Later, when it has evaporated, you stare in dismay at your empty palm, where only a little of the perfume lingers to prove that once it was there, and now is flown.”

— Margaret George

22. “When he comes into a room, you give a little gasp, deep inside, far inside,? someone once said when trying to describe what it meant to love.”

— Margaret George

23. “Thus we use our supposed “knowledge” of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.”

— Margaret George

24. “Whether you are classically beautiful or not, this one thing I know: you give the impression of being beautiful, which is all one can ask. The jewels become you, they do not belittle you.”

— Margaret George

25. “Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine – that is, activity – which could solve it, is seen as odious.”

— Margaret George

26. “He ran both his hands through his hair, as if somehow that would straighten out his thoughts.”

— Margaret George

27. “I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.”

— Margaret George

28. “Snakes. How fitting. Not only are they sacred to Egypt, but associated with the power of the underworld and with fertility. Perhaps I did you a favor by refusing more conventional poisons.”

— Margaret George

29. “We are more than our bodies, it is true; but we cannot be divorced from them. They are us, and the only way in which we can see one another. Perhaps the gods are above this, but in their mercy, they have given us the guise of bodies.”

— Margaret George

30. “To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room.”

— Margaret George

31. “Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth’s cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window.”

— Margaret George

32. “The most wicked criminals have God on their lips at all times, for God is the only one who can stomach them.”

— Margaret George

33. “When we are ready, the gods send what we need.”

— Margaret George

34. “The soft strings of the lute rippled with memories, and the maid’s lilting voice made Mary sigh as she closed her eyes. She fell asleep filled with sadness, but without regret.”

— Margaret George

35. “There are two kinds of tales: one accurate but not true, the other true but not accurate.”

— Margaret George

36. “No matter what they are in life, in memory they always seem to rearrange themselves in the opposite manner. All pleasures are seen as foreshortened and hasty and fleeting, and all pain lingering.”

— Margaret George

37. “Every inch of land there is so contested,” I observed, more to myself than to him. “How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art.”

— Margaret George

38. “Looking out the rain-fogged window at the gray November day, Mary felt almost grateful for the snug warmth of her well-heated chamber. Escape, the captive queen decided with a yawn, would have to wait until spring.”

— Margaret George

39. “I was ever the realist, sometimes to my sorrow. But seldom to my regret.”

— Margaret George

40. “In my experience, there are two things that no one will admit to: having no sense of humor and being susceptible to flattery.”

— Margaret George

41. “But marrying within one’s own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.”

— Margaret George

42. “We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say...”

— Margaret George

43. “Omens. If I were beginning again, starting out in life, I would ignore all omens, neither heeding them nor trying to disable them. If we chose to pass them by, then perhaps they would lose their power, as old gods and goddesses, no longer worshiped, fade away and lose their grip on us.”

— Margaret George

44. “A green so pure that beside it emeralds were dirty and grass dull. The green of Egypt’s fields, the fierce green of her crops under the sun, glowing under the eye of Re. Green seemed the most Egyptian of all colors: her Nile, her crocodiles, her papyrus. And Wadjyt, the cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, whose very name means “the green one.”

— Margaret George

45. “The war at Troy seemed to grow in song, poetry, and story all the while. As it faded from living memory, it grew larger and larger. Men claimed descent from one or the other of the heroes, or, failing that, anyone who had fought in the war, which now assumed the stature of a clash between the gods and the titans.”

— Margaret George

46. “Now I felt the long-forgotten urgency of lovemaking, when it seems one’s human selves leave, to be replaced by hungry beasts bolting their food. Gone are the civilized beings who talk of manners and journeys and letters; in their places are two bodies straining to give birth to a burst of inhuman pleasure followed by a great, floating nothingness. An explosion of life followed by death – in this we live, and in this we foreshadow our own sweet deaths.”

— Margaret George

47. “I will suffocate, drugged by elixir of roses.”

— Margaret George

48. “War is a sinkhole that sucks money and men into it and is never filled.”

— Margaret George

49. “I would want someone I could love to madness, someone who was myself, only better, someone I could never get enough of looking at.”

— Margaret George