Quotes By Author: Hope Mirrlees

“So fine a medicine is the will to action.”

“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.”

“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.”

“…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. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the ‘values,’ with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.”