Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mary Renault

Hatred isn’t framed here as a hot, explosive feeling; it’s a horticultural process. Renault’s genius is in making malice sound slow, domestic, almost tasteful: you brood, you graft, you grow. Those verbs drag hatred out of the realm of righteous reaction and into the everyday habits that actually shape a life. “In hatred as in love” is the scalpel twist. Love is culturally licensed as transformative; Renault insists hatred is just as formative, just with uglier outcomes. The line warns that you don’t simply point loathing outward. You cultivate it, tend it, and it repays the attention by taking up residence inside you.

The subtext is moral but not preachy: identity is porous, and the mind is an imitative machine. When you fixate on an enemy, you start rehearsing their contours until you can perform them. That’s why “grow like the thing we brood upon” lands so hard: it suggests resemblance as a kind of psychic contamination. “What we loathe, we graft into our very soul” implies permanence. Grafting isn’t a passing mood; it’s surgery. You’ve altered the stock.

Renault, a mid-century novelist steeped in Greek antiquity and its brutal codes of honor, would have seen how vendetta and moral purity narratives create the very cruelty they claim to oppose. The line reads like a quiet indictment of ideological obsession: the person certain they’re resisting corruption may be importing its methods, its language, its appetites. Hatred, Renault implies, doesn’t just distort your view of others; it colonizes your character.