The Hill of Dreams Quotes

“It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“But he recognized that the illusions of the child only differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque; belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who travelled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come sand go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuine pages.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very far, all the long way from the known to the unknown.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“He was oppressed by the grim conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort. He had never come out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the earth.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“The adept could, in truth, change those who were obnoxious to him into harmless and unimportant shapes, not as in the letter of the old stories, by transforming the enemy, but by transforming himself. The magician puts men below him by going up higher, as one looks down on a mountain city from a loftier crag.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, "Will it pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth, he would only read what was uncouth and useless.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“It was an interminable labor, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“All London was one grey temple of an awful rite, ring within ring of wizard stones circled about some central place, every circle was an initiation, every initiation eternal loss.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“The fancy that sensations are symbols and not realities hovered in his mind, and led him to speculate as to whether they could not actually be transmuted one into another.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“And Lucian felt most keenly that in his case there was a double curse; he was as isolated as Keats, and as inarticulate as his reviewers.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“Lucian pigeon-holed the letter solemnly in the receptacle lettered "Barbarians.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“For many months he had occasional fits of recollection, both cold and hot; but the bridge of time, gradually lengthening, made those dreadful and delicious images grow more and more indistinct, till at last they all passed into that wonderland which a youth looks back upon in amazement, not knowing why this used to be a symbol of terror or that of joy.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“There was a certain corner where the heat of that hot August seemed concentrated, reverberated from one wall to the other,”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“and suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“His school-fellows thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed were very kind to him in their barbarous manner.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams