M.R. James Quotes

#1. joy is of all gifts the most divine.

M.R. James

#2. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!

M.R. James

#3. You can drive at 16, go to war at 18, drink at 21, and retire at 65. So who can say what age you have to be to find your true love?

M.R. James

#4. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands;

M.R. James

#5. Few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously.

M.R. James

#6. The moon shone upon his almost transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long and that the light shone through them.

M.R. James

#7. Do I believe in ghosts? ... I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.

M.R. James

#8. I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.

M.R. James

#9. As for him, he was naturally somewhat dashed by the consciousness of duty unfulfilled, but more so by the prospect of a lawn-tennis party, which, though an inevitable evil in August, he had thought there was no occasion to fear in May.

M.R. James

#10. What is all this love for if we have to go out into the dark?

M.R. James

#11. Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.

M.R. James

#12. Yes, I definitely prefer the daylight population of the playing fields to that which comes there after dark.

M.R. James

#13. I assure you, if Uncle Henry had stepped out from among the trees in a little copse which borders the path at one place, carrying his head under his arm, I should have been very little more uncomfortable than I was. To tell you the truth, I was rather expecting something of the kind.

M.R. James

#14. If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.

M.R. James

#15. as his enthusiastic endorsement of the

M.R. James

#16. cast-iron erection, on

M.R. James

#17. His girl was on the tentacles of expectation about it.
(From Mr. Humphreys and his Inheritance)

M.R. James