The Charioteer Quotes

“There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“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 in screwing down all the pressure valves and smashing in the gauge. You can do it for a bit and then something goes. Sometimes it gets that the only thing is just to say, 'That's what I'd like to feel twenty-four hours a day; but, the hell with it, this is how I feel now.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It's not what one is, it's what one does with it.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“In seven years, thought Laurie, every cell in one's body has been replaced, even our memories live in a new brain. That is not the face I saw, and these are not the eyes I saw with. Even our selves are not the same, but only a consequence of the selves we had then. Yet I was there and I am here; and this man, who is sometimes what I remember and sometimes a stranger I met at a party the other day, is also to himself the I who was there: his mind in its different skull has travelled back to a place his living feet never visited; and the pain he felt then he can feel again.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“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 half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“He was filled with a vast sense of the momentous, of unknown mysteries. He did not know what he should demand of himself, nor did it seem to matter, for he had not chosen this music he moved to, it had chosen him.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“He looked as if he were anxiously balancing a large handful of tact, without quite knowing where to put it down.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“I wanted someone to follow, I wanted him to be brave. But he wants to be brave for me; and no one can do that.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“The lovers of the innocent must protect them above all from the knowledge of their own cruelty.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of human experience. They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“I'm not prepared to accept a standard which puts the whole of my emotional life on the plane of immorality.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It's only since it's been made impossible that it's been made so damn easy. It's got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing it, nobody caring how you hold your liquor, you've been smart enough if you get it at all. You can't make good wine in a bathtub in the cellar, you need sun and rain and fresh air, you need pride in a job you can tell the world about. Only you can live without drink if you have to, but you can't live without love.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, ‘Is it a queer book?’
‘No,’ said Laurie.
‘Oh,’ said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It had come to him that no one would ever look from these eyes but he: that among all the lives, numerous beyond imagination, in which he might have lived, he was this one, pinned to this single point of infinity; the rest always to be alien, he to be I.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Just lately I have been happier than I ever had the right to expect, and as one goes around the world one sees that happiness is hard to come by and seldom lasts for long.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Quietly, as night shuts down the uncertain prospect of the road ahead, the wheels sink to stillness in the dust of the halting-place, and the reins drop from the driver’s loosened hands. Staying each his hunger on what pasture the place affords them, neither the white horse nor the black reproaches his fellow for drawing their master out of the way. They are far, both of them, from home and lonely, and lengthened by their strife the way has been hard. Now their heads droop side by side till their long manes mingle, and when the voice of the charioteer falls silent they are reconciled for a night in sleep.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“you’ll get into this morbid state when you think if you want something, then you shouldn’t have it.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“...temptation, that in itself it is nothing but an opportunity for choice; so it is rather defeatist to feel very guilty about it, as though one were half ready to commit the sin.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“In his imagination the pages were printed not with their own paragraphs only, but with all that he himself had brought to them: it seemed as though he must be identified and revealed in them, beyond all pretence of detachment, as if they were a diary to which he had committed every secret of his heart.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“I should think more crimes have probably been committed by chaps with inferiority complexes trying to demonstrate their virility, than even for money.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Now for the first time he realized how important it had been not to admit any alternative to the hard, decent, orthodox choice which need not be regarded as a choice at all; how important not to be different.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Sometimes things are easier if there isn’t anyone to know how you’re feeling.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“You may think I have been rather quick to decide I am in love. But he is a clear kind of person, about whom one has to think clearly.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“The twilight struck chilly as he went outside. He experienced for the first time that special dread brought by the first touch of winter to lovers who have nowhere to meet except out of doors.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“I don't know what more there is to say, except this: that since one can't refuse to know oneself, and it must have happened eventually, I would rather it was through you than anyone else.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“Laurie stood casting his long shadow on the room behind him, silent in a grief and wonder too deep for tears, that life was so divided and irreconcilable, and the good so implacably the enemy of the best.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this was what you wanted.”
― Mary Renault, The Charioteer