Top 80 Mary Stewart Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The sense of smell is the hair-trigger of memory.”

— Mary Stewart

2. “Sometimes, I think, our impulses come not from the past, but from the future.”

— Mary Stewart

3. “It is never wise to turn aside from knowing, however the knowing comes.”

— Mary Stewart

4. “The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it’s useless even to try.”

— Mary Stewart

5. “Happiness changes as you change. It’s in yourself.”

— Mary Stewart

6. “Press on, regardless.”

— Mary Stewart

7. “Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.”

— Mary Stewart

8. “A good house, deep in the woods, with a garden all around it and a river flowing past it. Fruit trees, and flowers planted for the bees. A place to grow my herbs. Silence in winter, and in summer nothing but the birds. Lonely as the grave, and every bit as restful.”

— Mary Stewart

9. “Give me time to be myself, know myself, become a little used to happiness. The rest will be up to me.”

— Mary Stewart

10. “The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.”

— Mary Stewart

11. “Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.”

— Mary Stewart

12. “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

13. “I sometimes think it’s a mistake to have been happy when one was a child. One should always want to go on, not back.”

— Mary Stewart

14. “It was nearing 9 O’clock, and the fist duck was drawing down. Behind the trees, the first star pricked out, low and brilliant. The light breeze of the day had dropped, and the evening was very still. The stream sounded loud. I walked down to the gate and stood leaning on the top bar, enjoying the scent of the roses, and straining to listen for any sound from the lane or the road beyond.”

— Mary Stewart

15. “At breakfast!′ said Louise in an awed voice. ‘A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.”

— Mary Stewart

16. “I suppose one gets to know men quickest by the things they take for granted.”

— Mary Stewart

17. “It is one thing to have the gift of seeing the spirits and hearing the Gods who move about us as we come and go; but it is a gift of darkness as well as light.”

— Mary Stewart

18. “The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already.”

— Mary Stewart

19. “It was the egret, flying out of the lemon grove, that started it. I won’t pretend I saw it straight away as the conventional herald of adventure, the white stag of the fairy-tale, which, bounding from the enchanted thicket, entices the prince away from his followers, and loses him in the forest where danger threatens with the dusk.”

— Mary Stewart

20. “The gods only go with you if you put yourself in their path. And that takes courage.”

— Mary Stewart

21. “All that we have is to live what life brings. Die what death comes.”

— Mary Stewart

22. “Silence then, and the scent of apple trees, and the nightmare sense of grief that comes when a man wakes again to feel a loss he has forgotten in sleep.”

— Mary Stewart

23. “Take love easy, as the leaves grow on the trees.”

— Mary Stewart

24. “To plant a garden is the chief of the arts of peace.”

— Mary Stewart

25. “Knowledge, I suppose, blocked the gates of vision.”

— Mary Stewart

26. “I reached for sleep and drew it round me like a blanket muffling pain and thought together in the merciful dark.”

— Mary Stewart

27. “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

28. “Life does just go on, and you change, and you can’t go back. You have to live it the way it comes.”

— Mary Stewart

29. “Mother and daughter got on very well indeed, with a deep affection founded on almost complete misunderstanding.”

— Mary Stewart

30. “Merlin, do you mind?′ It was the King who asked me, a man as old and wise as myself; a man who could see past his own crowding problems, and guess what it might men to me, to walk in dead air where once the world had been a god-filled garden.”

— Mary Stewart

31. “The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.”

— Mary Stewart

32. “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

33. “The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.”

— Mary Stewart

34. “Like the first breath of living wind to the sailor becalmed and starving, I felt hope stir.”

— Mary Stewart

35. “There is no one so leadenfooted as the reluctant bringer of bad news.”

— Mary Stewart

36. “Nothing ever happens to me.”

— Mary Stewart

37. “I knew that I had turned my world back to cinders, sunk my lovely ship with my own stupid, wicked hands.”

— Mary Stewart

38. “I can say ‘reduce your stress level’ until I’m blue in the face.”

— Mary Stewart

39. “But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power, that they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.”

— Mary Stewart

40. “Well, what was luck for if it was never to be tempted?”

— Mary Stewart

41. “In all that ever mattered, you are unchanged. Old? Yes, we must all grow old. Age is nothing but the sum of life. And you are alive, and back with me here. By the great God of heaven, I have you back with me. What should I fear now?”

— Mary Stewart

42. “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

43. “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

44. “Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted.”

— Mary Stewart

45. “It does not do to neglect the gods of a place, whoever they may be. In the end, they are all one.”

— Mary Stewart

46. “It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.”

— Mary Stewart

47. “People are straightforward enough, on the whole, till one starts to look for crooked motives, and then, oh boy, how crooked can they be!”

— Mary Stewart

48. “I think that knowing the future might be disturbing, but it can be good as well; knowing and not being frightened, having the time to make all one’s arrangements, and knowing that there are good hands waiting for the things and people one cares about.”

— Mary Stewart

49. “A robin lighted on a blackthorn at my elbow, and began to sing. The sound came high and sweet and uncaring through all the noise of battle. To this day, whenever I think of the battle for Kaerconan, it brings to mind a robin’s song, mingled with the croaking of the ravens.”

— Mary Stewart

50. “I doubt if there are many normal women who can resist looking at houses. I believe, in fact, that when a house is up for sale more than half the people who look over it are not prospective buyers, but merely ladies who cannot resist exploring someone else’s house.”

— Mary Stewart