Mary Renault

"You mustn't get so upset about what you feel, Spud. No one's a hundred per cent consistent all the time. We might like to be. We can plan our lives along certain lines. But you know, there's no future…"

"It is better to learn war early from friends, than late from enemies."

"Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat."

"He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other …"

"In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul."

"He sees himself in his lover as if in a mirror, not knowing whom he sees, And when they are together, he too is released from pain, and when apart, he longs as he himself is longed for; for reflected …"

"So now, for mercy and honor shown to my people, my lord is barbarous; a tyrant, because he punished his would-be murderers, the right of their meanest citizen; a mere vaunting soldier, though wherever…"

"Don't you understand even seedtime and reaping? How can people trust the harvest, unless they see it sown?"