Happy Birthday Mary Stewart!

Every man carries the seed of his own death, and you will not be more than a man. You will have everything; you cannot have more…

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

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

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

Nothing ever happens to me.

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.

To expect and dread a thing for a lifetime; does not prepare you for the thing itself.

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

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

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.

If anyone was to perform the classic folly of taking a midnight stroll among the murderous gentlemen with whom the hotel was probably packed, it was not going to be me.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.

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

If a man goes up into Parnassus after sunset, why should he not see strange things? The gods still walk there, and a man who would not go carefully in the country of the gods is a fool.

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

Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive.

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

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

I can say 'reduce your stress level' until I'm blue in the face.

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

The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless even to try.

The best words in the best order...one always go the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Poetry was awful good material to think with.

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

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