# Quote — 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 so 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.'

- Author: [Mary Renault](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault.md)
- Book: [The Charioteer](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault/the-charioteer.md)
- Page: 285
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Renault#The_Charioteer_(1953)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault/the-charioteer/you-mustnt-get

## More from this book

> Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.

p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault/the-charioteer/each-man-in-his.md)

> 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.

p. 164 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault/the-charioteer/he-kept-telling.md)

> 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 in his heart is love's image, which is love's answer. But he calls it, and believes it, not love but friendship…

p. 104 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/mary-renault/the-charioteer/he-sees-himself.md)