Quotes from Lud-in-the-Mist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“each variety of humor is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world.”
― Hope Mirrlees, quote from 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 give
impudence to his betters!”
― Hope Mirrlees, quote from Lud-in-the-Mist

“You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.”
― Hope Mirrlees, quote from Lud-in-the-Mist

“A relationship that has become artificial, and connected, on one side, with a sense of duty rather than with spontaneous affection, is always an uncomfortable one.”
― Hope Mirrlees, quote from Lud-in-the-Mist

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“I thought we were the good guys,” he said, and it had that note of a child who finally realizes that sometimes good and evil aren’t so much opposites, as two sides of a coin. You toss it one way, and it looks good, another way, and it’s evil. Sometimes it just depends on which end of the gun you’re on.”
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“So . . . this means we’re buried in the same cemetery?”
He nodded, and then the tiniest smile crept over his features. When he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its bitter edge. “More proof that we’re fated to be together, don’t you think?”
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“I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.”
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