Hope Mirrlees Quotes

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.

All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider's web, and how little lemon-colored buds are studding the thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts - they come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves

Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At last they settled down to their long watch - squatting round the fire, and laughing for sheer love of adventure as good campaigners should; for were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal of night and day?

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!

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

In [man's] mouth is ever the bittersweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell.

And there were ruined castles covered with ivy - the badge of the old order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides violets.

And then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.

The law plays fast and loose with reality- and no one really believes it.

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!

You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick.

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.

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.

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.

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 ever 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.

And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground. He

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

There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

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