Lud-In-The-Mist

by 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.

“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.

Pride and resentment are not indigenous in 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.

‘though you talk more nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that you’re not such a fool as you look

For every tree can be a gallows, and every man has a neck to hang.’

And this is but another proof that 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! And with this final exhortation this book shall close.