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.

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.

Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.

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.

A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.

It was not so much a modification of the darkness, as a sigh of relief, a slight relaxing of tension, so that one felt, rather than saw, that the night had suddenly lost a shade of its density... ah! yes; there! between these two shoulders of the hills she is bleeding to death.

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

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.

The law plays fast and loose with reality- and no one really believes it.

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 may be 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 candlelight, when all the house is still.

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, tenderness, alarm.

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!

So fine a medicine is the will to action.

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.

... the round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

There’s no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.

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 shadows

You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick.

...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.

Let a thing be but a sort of punctual surprise, like the first cache of violets in March, let it be delicate, painted and gratuitous, hinting that the Creator is solely occupied with aesthetic considerations, and combines disparate objects simply because they look so well together, and that thing will admirably fill the role of a flower.

each variety of humor is a sort of totem, making at once for unity and separation. Its votaries it unites into a closely-knit brotherhood, but it separates them sharply off from all the rest of the world.

...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.

A relationship that has become artificial, and connected, on one side, with a sense of duty rather than with spontaneous affection, is always an uncomfortable one.

His own way to a sick man is what grass is to a sick dog.

The narrow zone of color created by the firelight was like the planet Earth―a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows.

Poetry and visions, springing as they do from an ever-present sense of mortality, might easily appear morbid to the sturdy common sense of a burgher-class in the making.

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.

And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green?

For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or duration - no more part of the permament background of the world than the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted through the valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish, and that he could see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the foilage of the trees.

A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.

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

Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.

..fairy was delusion, so was the law. At any rate, it was a sort of magic, moulding reality into any shape it chose.

just as tunes once gay inevitably become plaintive when the generation that first sang them has turned to dust․

And it was in sheer self-defence that they obeyed - as if by dancing they somehow or other escaped from that tune, which seemed to be themselves.

And then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.

Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent.

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 eve, or, what's worse, bringing their first baby into the world, and the world's wagged on all the same. Life's sad enough, in all conscience, but there's nothing to be frightened about in it or to turn one's stomach. I was country-bred, and as my old granny used to say, "There's no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars." And why? Because it gets one used to the look of Time. There's no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one's been used all one's life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing. They say the fruit from over the hills makes one sing. I've never tasted so much as a sherd of it, but for all that I can sing.

He sprang to his feet, and cried roughly, ‘I’ll give you a handful of Yeses and Noes, Jessamine, and it’ll keep you amused for the rest of the evening sorting them out, and sticking them on to your questions. I’m going out.

To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside — it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees. And is the only exit that small round hole in the distance? Why, you will never be able to squeeze through that! You must turn back ... too late! The spacious portal by which you entered has in its turn shrunk to a small round hole.

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things -- like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.) I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels. Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't!

And there were ruined castles covered with ivy - the badge of the old order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides violets.

Lud-in-the-Mist had all the things that make an old town pleasant. It had an ancient Guild Hall, built of mellow golden bricks and covered with ivy and, when the sun shone on it, it looked like a rotten apricot; it had a harbour in which rode vessels with white and red tawny sails; it had flat brick houses - not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures, renewing and modifying themselves with each generation under their changeless antique roofs.

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: We (and then we say our own names), Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.

It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.

Beauty doesn’t keep, but rots like apples.

Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.

The man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.

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.

that one could play with reality and give it what shape one chose.

and so convinced are we that each mood while it lasts will be the permanent temper of our soul

With each word her voice rose higher, like a soaring bird. But at the last word it was as if the bird when it had reached the ceiling suddenly fell down dead

Their long, meandering tales of humble normal lives were like the proverbial glimpse of a snug, lamp-lit parlour to a traveller belated after nightfall.

Fairyland is the place where what we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur

it was a reality shared by all the world, and not merely an optical delusion confined to their own eyes in their own garden.

Then the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red.

quiet days, smells and noises that are like old tunes, healing nights…

sense of safety was tingling in his veins like a generous wine

He could not stand people saying, "Who knows what we shall be doing this time next year?" and he loathed such expressions as "for the last time," "never again"..

objects that he very rarely either looked at or thought about, though the loss of them would have caused him to go half mad with rage and chagrin.

Reality was beginning to become very shadowy and menacing.

It was in the spring of his fiftieth year that Master Nathaniel Chanticleer had his first real anxiety.

… there is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy. Endymion Leer

Then, the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red.

Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.

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 give impudence to his betters!

you Senators make a great mistake in ignoring what takes place in those low haunts. Nasty things have a way of not always staying at the bottom, you know - stir the pond and they rise to the top.

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 Gibberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered.

But the other tribe — the passionate, tragic, rootless tree — man? Alas! He is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries.

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 things expressed! But there must surely be relief in thus allowing the mood to mould the body's attitude to its own shape. He had no need now to ask his son for explanations. He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters — like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon. But when it is another person who is suffering in this way, in spite of one's pity, how trivial it all seems! How certain one is of being able to expel the agony with reasoning and persuasion!

started writing Stardust in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about seventy years to do it. The mid-1920s seemed like a time when people enjoyed writing those sorts of things, before there were fantasy shelves in the bookshops, before trilogies and books ‘in the great tradition of The Lord of the Rings’. This, on the other hand, would be in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. All I was certain of was that nobody had written books on computers back in the 1920s, so I bought a large book of unlined pages, and the first fountain pen I had owned since my schooldays and a copy of Katharine Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies. I filled the pen and began.

All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider’s web, and how little lemon-colored buds are studding the thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts — they come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves

We have the misfortune of living in a country that marches with the unknown; and that is apt to make the fancy sick. Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.

To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside — it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees.

The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to them.

At last they settled down to their long watch — squatting round the fire, and laughing for sheer love of adventure as good campaigners should; for were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal of night and day?

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground. He

And Master Nathaniel's pleached alley was growing yellower and yellower, and on the days when a thick white mist came rolling up from the Dapple it would be the only object in his garden that was not blurred and dimmed, and would look like a pair of gigantic golden compasses with which a demiurge is measuring chaos.

Have you ever noticed a little child of three or four walking hand in hand with its father through the streets? It is almost as if the two were walking in time to perfectly different tunes. Indeed, though they hold each other’s hand, they might be walking on different planets … each seeing and hearing entirely different things.

Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, 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 unwittingly 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 may be 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 candlelight, when all the house is still.

Nog voor de roep van Cantecleer Klinkt het geraaskal van Endymion Leer.

Bij de Zon, Maan en Sterren en de Gouden Appels van het Westen!

Arme, oude maan,' grinnikte Nathaniel, die helemaal in zijn sas was. 'Hij eigent zich eindeloos kleuren toe om er zijn bleke gezicht mee te beschilderen, en het blijft vergeefs!

Huizen werden tot het Stille Volk gerekend. Muren hebben oren, maar geen tong. Huizen, bomen en doden zwijgen als het graf.

She dimpled a little at her own blunder, and then said guardedly, "And what would bring me into the law courts, I should like to know? The past is over and done with, and what is done can't be undone." Master Nathaniel fixed her with a searching gaze, and, forgetting his assumed character, spoke as himself. "Mistress Peppercorn," he said solemnly, "have you no pity for the dead, the dumb, helpless dead? You loved your father, I am sure. When a word from you might help to avenge him, as you going to leave that word unsaid? Who can say that the dead are not grateful for the loving thoughts of the living, and that they do not rest more quietly in their graves when they have been avenged? Have you no time or pity left for your dead father?

He knew so well both that sense of emptiness, that drawing in of the senses (like the antennae of some creature when danger is no longer imminent, but there), so that the physical world vanishes, while you yourself at once swell out to fill its place, and at the same time shrink to a millionth part of your former bulk, turning into a mere organ of suffering without thought and without emotions; he knew also that other phase, when one seems to be flying from days and months, like a stag from its hunters — like the fugitives, on the old tapestry, from the moon.

Mother Tibbs made but an indifferent housemaid, for she spent most of her time at the garden gate, waving her handkerchief to the passers-by. And if, when at her work, she heard the sound of a fiddle or flute, however distant, she would instantly stop whatever she was doing and start dancing, brandishing wildly in the air broom, or warming-pan, or whatever domestic implement she may have been holding in her hands at the time.

And, judging from Dame Jessamine's serene and smiling face, he had succeeded in removing completely the terrible impression produced by her husband's parting words, and in restoring to what she was pleased to call her mind its normal condition, namely that of a kettle that contains just enough water to simmer comfortably over a low fire.

Poor old moon!" chuckled master Nathaniel, who was now in the highest of spirits, "always filching colours with which to paint her own pale face, and all in vain!

When, on his return to Lud-in-the-Mist, he had been twitted for having wasted so much time on such an unworthy object, he had answered that a pig was thrall to the same master as a Mayor, and that it needed as much skill to cure the one as the other; adding that a good fiddler enjoys fiddling for its own sake, and that it is all the same to him whether he plays at a yokel’s wedding or a merchant’s funeral.

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 unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.

Ebeneezor was a paragon of dignity and respectability, and it was a joke in Lud society that you could not really be sure of your social status till he came to wind your clocks himself, instead of sending one of his apprentices. However, the apprentice he sent to Master Nathaniel was almost as respectable looking as he was himself. He wore a neat black wig, and his expression was sanctimonious in the extreme, with the corners of his mouth turned down, like one of his master's clocks that had stopped at 7:25.

For if human, or superhuman, experience, and the tragic clash of personality can be expressed by plastic shapes, then one might half believe that these tortured trees had been bent by the wind into the spiritual shape of some old drama.

And he woke up the next morning light-hearted and eager; so fine a medicine was the will to action.

as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself

For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be 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 he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures - what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence?