Lud-in-the-Mist Quotes

“A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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

“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

“You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.”
― 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 the dead were carried to Fairyland.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the 'values,' with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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

“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 marriage eve, or, what's worse, bringing their first baby into the world, and the world's wagged on all the same. Life's sad enough, in all conscience, but there's nothing to be frightened about in it or to turn one's stomach. I was country-bred, and as my old granny used to say, "There's no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars." And why? Because it gets one used to the look of Time. There's no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one's been used all one's life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing. They say the fruit from over the hills makes one sing. I've never tasted so much as a sherd of it, but for all that I can sing.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“The law plays fast and loose with reality- and no one really believes it.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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

“There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“... the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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

“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

“...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“There’s no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or duration - no more part of the permament background of the world than the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted through the valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish, and that he could see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the foilage of the trees.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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

“But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“So fine a medicine is the will to action.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“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 things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own shape.

He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters — like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.

But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of one's pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: We (and then we say our own names), Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside — it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that! You must turn back ... too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist