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.

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 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...

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!...

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

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...

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 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...

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 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!

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

…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...

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...

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...

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”.

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...

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...

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...