Quotes by Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“The country people, indeed, did not always clearly distinguish between the Fairies and the dead. They called them both the 'Silent People'; and the Milky Way they thought was the path along which t...”

“As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along his thoughts turned to the Farmer Gibberty, who many a time must have jogged along this path, in just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things ...”

“A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.”

“There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense.”

“But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can giveimpudence to his betters!”

“Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.”

“Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.”

“Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.”

“It shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy.”

“So fine a medicine is the will to action.”

“It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.”

“Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdycommon sense of a burgher-class in the making.”

“Master Nathaniel looked at him. The fixed stare, the slightly-open mouth, the rigid motionless body, fettered by a misery too profound for restlessness how well he knew the state of mind these thi...”

“What's the use of crying, and retching, and belching, all day long, like your lady downstairs? Life has its sad side, and we must take the rough with the smooth. Why, maids have died on their marri...”

“Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”

“He says to me, Ranulph, he says... that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.”

“But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.”

“The Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning!”

“Was it possible that Ranulph, too, was a real person, a person inside whose mind things happened? He had thought that he himself was the only real person in a field of human flowers. For Master Nat...”

“The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little f...”