The Return Quotes

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until...”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Once a man strays out of the common herd, he's more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“He got out of bed and peeped through the blinds. To the east and opposite to him gardens and an apple-orchard lay, and there in strange liquid tranquility hung the morning star, and rose, rilling into the dusk of night the first grey of dawn. The street beneath its autumn leaves was vacant, charmed, deserted.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“An hour's terror is better than a lifetime of timidity.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“What a haunting, inescapable riddle life was.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, like water in old ditches.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Yes, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Now that cleverness was the fashion most people were clever – even perfect fools; and cleverness after all was often only a bore: all head and no body.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“We are *all* we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said – it's only the impossible that's credible; whatever credible may mean...”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“The viewless air seemed to be flocking with hidden listeners. The very clearness and the crystal silence were their ambush. He alone seemed to be the target of cold and hostile scrutiny. There was not a breath to breathe in this crisp, pale sunshine. It was all too rare, too thin. The shadows lay like wings everlastingly folded.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities – why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“I believe in the devil, in the Powers of Darkness, Lawford, as firmly as I believe he and they are powerless – in the long run. They – what shall we say? - have surrendered their intrinsicality. You can just go through evil, as you can go through a sewer, and come out on the other side. A loathsome process too.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“That's why I've just gone on … collecting this particular kind of stuff – what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it – just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were really only appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“The time's gone by for sentiment and all that foolery. Mercy's all very well but after all it's justice that clinches the bargain.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Science, I am told, is making great strides, experimenting, groping after things which no sane man has ever dreamed of before – without being burned alive for it.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“It was to be a day of queer experiences. He had never realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Fancies were all very well for a change, but must be only occasional guests in a world devoted to reality.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Lawford had soundlessly stolen a pace or two nearer, and by stopping forward he could, each in turn, scrutinize the little intent company sitting over his story around the lamp at the further end of the table; squatting like little children with their twigs and pins, fishing for wonders on the brink of the unknown.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“They say death’s a going to bed; I doubt it; but anyhow life’s a long undressing. We came in puling and naked, and every stitch must come off before we get out again. We must stand on our feet in all our Rabelaisian nakedness, and watch the world fade.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return

“Long after they had bidden each other good-night, long after Herbert had trodden on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford sat leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the crashing music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never sleeps beneath the tides and waves og consciousness, was listening, too, almost as unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed in conflict through his brain.”
― Walter de la Mare, The Return