Top 80 Mary Stewart Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Someone’s got to look after the devil himself, as long as he wears clothes and needs food and drink.”

— Mary Stewart

52. “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

53. “William’s mother, dead these six years. He spoke of her with love, but without grief. Six years, and whatever the loss, happiness steals back.”

— Mary Stewart

54. “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

55. “I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.”

— Mary Stewart

56. “The village is perched on a precipitous hillside, and the houses are built in tiers, one up behind the other, the floor of one level with the roof of the next. The whole village looks as if it were just about to slide into the depths of the valley below.”

— Mary Stewart

57. “Folks will say anything, and next time round they’ll believe it.”

— Mary Stewart

58. “A round moon stood low in the sky, pale still, and smudged with shadow, and thin at one edge like a worn coin. There was a scatter of small stars, with here and there the shepherd stars herding them, and across from the moon one great star alone, burning white. The shadows were long and soft on the seeding grasses. A.”

— Mary Stewart

59. “The sour smell was not the smell of fungus. It was unlit incense, and cold ashes, and unsaid prayers. I.”

— Mary Stewart

60. “But, as a form of exercise, I cannot recommend carrying a suitcase for a mile or so along sand and shingle at the dead of night, and then edging one’s way along a narrow path where a false step will mean plunging into a couple of fathoms of sea that, however quiet, is toothed like a shark with jagged fangs of rock.”

— Mary Stewart

61. “A story-book hero had by definition no place in life; he battered his way through twenty victorious chapters, faded out on a lustful kiss, and was gone for good.”

— Mary Stewart

62. “It is for you to choose. Choice is man’s right, and for that I leave you free.”

— Mary Stewart

63. “Then she saw me watching her. For perhaps two seconds our eyes met and held. I knew then why the ancients armed the cruellest god with arrows; I felt the shock of it right through my body.”

— Mary Stewart

64. “Something was moving; there was a kind of breathing brightness in the air, the wind of God brushing by, invisible in sunlight.”

— Mary Stewart

65. “Count Ambrosius was out of practice at chess. The usual game was dice, and he was not risking that against an infant soothsayer. Chess, being a matter of mathematics rather than magic, was less susceptible to the black arts.′ – twelve-year-old Merlin, The Crystal Cave, p. 131 of 384.”

— Mary Stewart

66. “I’m very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That’s something that happens in books, not among people you know.”

— Mary Stewart

67. “You never know how you’ll turn out till you’ve been down to half a dollar and no prospects.”

— Mary Stewart

68. “Only a child expects life to be just; it’s a man’s part to stand by the consequences of his deeds.”

— Mary Stewart

69. “I think the secret is that it belongs to all of us – to us of the West. We’ve learned to think in its terms, and to live in its laws. It’s given us almost everything that our world has that is worthwhile. Truth, straight thinking, freedom, beauty. It’s our second language, our second line of thought, our second country. We all have our own country – and Greece.”

— Mary Stewart

70. “And in another light-year or two I was through the word-barrier, and the book had suddenly reached the stage – the wonderful moment to get to – where I could walk right into my imaginary country and see things that I had not consciously created, and listen to people talking and watch them moving, all apparently independent of me.”

— Mary Stewart

71. “So here at last were the first lines of the story that was later to come clear, a story of spite and bigotry, too mean and petty to be called tragedy, but tragic for all that.”

— Mary Stewart

72. “I found that I was reaching, automatically, for another cigarette; my eyes and throat felt hot and aching, and my brain stupid. I let it slip back into the packet. I had smoked too much that evening already.”

— Mary Stewart

73. “Only now, his own barriers crumbling, did he realize how deep and absolute had been his need for her; and in the very moment of fullest realization she was here and she was his; his anchor, his still center, his searing flame, his peace...”

— Mary Stewart

74. “There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.”

— Mary Stewart

75. “A child thinks life is fair. A man stands by the consequences of his deeds.”

— Mary Stewart

76. “Merde, alors,’ said the parrot, muffled.”

— Mary Stewart

77. “When you let excitement in, Johnny would add, in a lecture-room sort of voice, fear will follow.”

— Mary Stewart

78. “This is the way of love, I find; one longs so fervently for the beloved to achieve the best ends that he is spared nothing.”

— Mary Stewart

79. “You made a discovery yesterday; remember? ‘No man is an Island.’ It’s true in more ways than one. Don’t go on hating yourself because there are some things you can’t do and can’t face on your own. None of us can.”

— Mary Stewart

80. “Literature and fiction are full of femmes fatales, but there is also an homme fatal, an altogether rarer bird, and pity help the lonely and impressionable female who comes within range of him.”

— Mary Stewart

81. “Not as others had wanted to learn, for power or excitement, or for the prosecution of some enmity or private greed; but because he had seen, darkly with a child’s eyes, how the gods move with the winds and speak with the sea and sleep in the gentle herbs; and how God himself is in the sum of all that is on the face of the lovely earth.”

— Mary Stewart

82. “I supposed there were circumstances in which it was correct, even praiseworthy, for a girl to bash a man’s head in with a lamp while he was kissing her...”

— Mary Stewart

83. “Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be doing all the time.”

— Mary Stewart

84. “Everybody needs a–a centre. Somewhere to go out from and come back to. And I suppose as you get older you enjoy the coming back more than the going out.”

— Mary Stewart

85. “Some three years after the end of the war my father died. He died as he had lived, quietly and with more thought for others than for himself.”

— Mary Stewart

86. “I have noticed that this is often the way with men who set their lives towards the distant glow of one high beacon; when the hilltop is reached and there is nowhere further to climb, and all that is left is to pile more on the flame and keep the beacon burning, why, then, they sit down beside it and grow old. Where their leaping blood warmed them before, now the beacon fire must do it from without.”

— Mary Stewart

87. “But I had begun to learn that in fact power made nothing smoother; when it came it was like having a wolf by the throat.”

— Mary Stewart

88. “The day went by, still and silent but for the muted calling of the sea-birds, and the sad little pipe of the ringed plover on the shingle.”

— Mary Stewart

89. “What does it matter what men call the light? It is the same light, and men must live by it or die.”

— Mary Stewart