Quotes by Hope Mirrlees

About Hope Mirrlees:

Hope Mirrlees is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy novel and influential classic, and for Paris: A Poem, a modernist poem that critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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, tender...

Hope Mirrlees

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

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 G...

Hope Mirrlees

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 shad...

Hope Mirrlees

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

Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they so wel...

Hope Mirrlees

...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 y...

Hope Mirrlees

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 ...

Hope Mirrlees

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

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

Hope Mirrlees

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

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

Hope Mirrlees

Stop a minute, Ambrose!" interrupted Master Nathaniel. "I've got a sudden silly whim that we should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book... the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: (and then we say ...

Hope Mirrlees

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

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

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

Author Bio

  • NameHope Mirrlees
  • DescriptionBritish translator, poet and novelist
  • Born1887
  • Died1978
  • ProfessionNovelist