Home > Work > Lud-in-the-Mist

Lud-in-the-Mist QUOTES

Lud-in-the-Mist QUOTES

1 " 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 the dead were carried to Fairyland. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

2 " 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 that he was seeing and hearing now.
Yes, the Farmer Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

3 " 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. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

4 " So fine a medicine is the will to action. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

5 " A bad conscience makes a very good ghost. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

6 " There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

7 " 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 give
impudence to his betters! "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

8 " Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

9 " Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

10 " Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

11 " 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. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

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

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

13 " 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. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

14 " 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 Nathaniel that was a moment of surprise, triumph, tenderness, alarm. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

15 " But it is best to let sleeping facts lie. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

16 " 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! "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

17 " 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. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

18 " 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 freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

19 " A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist

20 " Pride and resentment are not indigenous to the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive. "

― Hope Mirrlees , Lud-in-the-Mist