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