Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist Quotes

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

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.

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.

So fine a medicine is the will to action.

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

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

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.

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

Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.

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.

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.

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.

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

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!