A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.

— Hope Mirrlees

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

— Hope Mirrlees

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!

— Hope Mirrlees

As Master Nathaniel jogged leisurely along his thoughts turned to the Farmer Liberty, who many a time must have jogged along this path, in just such a way, and seen and heard the very same things that he was seeing and hearing now. Yes, the Farmer Liberty had once been a real living man, like himself. And so had millions of others, whose names he had never heard. And one day he himself would be a prisoner, confined between the walls of other people's memory. And then he would cease even to be that, and become nothing but a few words cut in stone. What would these words be, he wondered.

— Hope Mirrlees

But it is best to let sleeping facts lie.

— Hope Mirrlees

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 give impudence to his betters!

— Hope Mirrlees

He says to me, Ralph, 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.

— Hope Mirrlees

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.

— Hope Mirrlees

It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilled all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

— Hope Mirrlees

Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.

— Hope Mirrlees