Hope Mirrlees quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Hope Mirrlees has a lot to say. In this list we present the 20 best Hope Mirrlees quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Hope Mirrlees quotes
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
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
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
So fine a medicine is the will to action.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
There had always been something rather brutal about (…_) common sense.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
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!
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.
— 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
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.
— 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 s
— 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
And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor — as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats!
— Hope Mirrlees
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
But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.
— 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
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
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
A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.
— Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
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