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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

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

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

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.

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.

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.