Mary Stewart Quotes

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

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

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

At breakfast!' said Louise in an awed voice. 'A man who can read poetry at breakfast would be capable of anything.

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

Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.