Courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.
-Mary Renault The Last of the Wine
Flowers you can get every year, but only with time the tree that shades your doorway and grows into the house with each year's sun and rain.
-Mary Renault The Last of the Wine
The gods punish hubris in men... So why should we think they praise it in cities?
-Mary Renault The Last of the Wine
There are draughts that do not yield their taste with the first sip; but drink them, and their bitterness wrings the mouth.
-Mary Renault The Last of the Wine
What is honor? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river.
-Mary Renault The Last of the Wine
Their gods, regarding their offerings kindly, kept from them the knowledge that they had been a means and not an end. In grief more than in joy, man longs to know that the universe turns around him.
-Mary Renault Fire from Heaven
Kleopatra: "The gods are unjust to women."
Alexander: "Yes, I have often thought so. But the gods are just; so it must be the fault of men."
-Mary Renault Fire from Heaven
All men are God's children. The excellent ones, he makes more his own than
the rest; but one can find them anywhere.
-Mary Renault The Persian Boy
Better the unknown danger than creeping miseries, coming slow like leprosy,
till one bears at last a life whose mere thought would once have made one end
it.
-Mary Renault The Persian Boy
Though the wise man knows all beauty is born to perish, one does not care to
be reminded of that either.
-Mary Renault The Persian Boy