"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
"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."
"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 thing..."
"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..."
"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."
"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!"
"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 Nathan..."
"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!"
"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."