Top 33 Hope Mirrlees Quotes
#1. Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.
Hope Mirrlees
#2. 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?
Hope Mirrlees
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. 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.
Hope Mirrlees
#7. 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.
Hope Mirrlees
#8. His own way to a sick man is what grass is to a sick dog.
Hope Mirrlees
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.
Hope Mirrlees
#17. 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
#18. Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.
Hope Mirrlees
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. There had always been something rather brutal about (..._) common sense.
Hope Mirrlees
#23. 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
#24. There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy.
Hope Mirrlees
#25. 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
#26. 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
#28. 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.
Hope Mirrlees
#29. 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
#30. A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.
Hope Mirrlees
#31. 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
#33. And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.
Hope Mirrlees
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