Thornyhold Quotes

“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.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“I suppose my mother could have been a witch if she had chosen to. But she met my father, who was a rather saintly clergyman, and he cancelled her out.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“A good house, deep in the woods, with a garden all around it and a river flowing past it. Fruit trees, and flowers planted for the bees. A place to grow my herbs. Silence in winter, and in summer nothing but the birds. Lonely as the grave, and every bit as restful.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“Give me time to be myself, know myself, become a little used to happiness. The rest will be up to me.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“Happiness changes as you change. It's in yourself.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“I had always been content to know that there was more in the living world than we could hope to understand.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“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, Thornyhold

“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, Thornyhold

“I think that knowing the future might be disturbing, but it can be good as well; knowing and not being frightened, having the time to make all one's arrangements, and knowing that there are good hands waiting for the things and people one cares about.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“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, Thornyhold

“I assure you, I've come to one of those natural breaks in the book, where one can walk away and let things go on working in the subconscious. It's true, don't look so unbelieving. It means I can afford to tear myself away from my view of the pigsties and go out on parole, as much as I like and you'll put up with.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“The scent of the stuff was familiar, evocative. Yet how? And when? It smelled of a damp meadow, the edge of a pool, a stream lapsing through green weeds. I could almost hear the rustle of Cousin Geillis’s dress, feel her peering over my shoulder as I started to replace the poultice. Comfrey, that was it; called knitbone, bruisewort, consound. The roots boiled in water or wine and the decoction drunk heals inward hurts, bruises, wounds and ulcers of the lung. The roots being outwardly applied cure fresh wounds or cuts immediately. (‘In or out, that’s sovereign.’) The recipe – Home Remedy or Receipt? – unreeled in my mind as if I had made it a hundred times. For the ointment, digest the root or leaves in hot paraffin wax, strain and allow to cool … And from somewhere faint and far back, a sentence that ran like a tranquil psalm: Comfrey joyeth in watery ditches, in fat and fruitfull meadowes; they grow all in my garden.”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“Even if she had left him (how long ago? I must ask William) he was still married. And in my vicarage-written and already old-fashioned book”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“fiction are full of femmes fatales”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“one beautiful day I gave myself a holiday”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“Love is foreseen from the beginning”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“Was nothing”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream”
― Mary Stewart, Thornyhold