Quotes from Lord Dunsany

I do not know who the two old men were or what any of them were doing, but there are moments when it is clearly time to go, and I left them there and then.

And emerging from these houses and going in, and seeing the pretence of paint and stucco year after year until it all peeled away, the souls of the poor owners of those houses sought to be other souls until they grew weary of it.

Hurriedly then he donned his magical sword in its wide scabbard of leather; and with scanty provisions hastened over the fields, after the last of the leaves, whose autumnal glory led him, as many a cause in its latter days, all splendid and fallen, leads all manner of men.

For at the last, O prophet, what is left? Only the gods of my childhood dead, and only Time striding large and lonely through the spaces, chilling the moon and paling the light of stars and scattering earthward out of both his hands the dust of forgetfulness over the fields of heroes and smitten Temples of the older gods.

And Night told whose blood had stained the marble steps that lead to the temple in Ozahn, and why the skull within it wears a golden crown, and whose soul is in the wolf that howls in the dark against the city.

Two days passed, while through woods and trees, and over the hills and the marshes, went the procession of spring, to the music of wood-pigeons cooing. It came like something new out of strange lands, that had never come before.

and I thought of the nations and unpitying Time

All that is is so because it was to be. Rail not, therefore, against what is, for it was all to be.

And you and I shall in a garden meet again upon an afternoon in summer when the sun stands midway between zenith and the sea, where we met oft before. For Fate and Chance play but one game together with every move the same, and they play it oft to while eternity away.

No it's better not to make gods or demons smile: they don't laugh at the same jokes as us.

Then said the gods: "Let Us make one to seek, to seek and never to find out concerning the wherefore of the making of the gods." And They made by the lifting of Their hands, each god according to his sign, the Bright One with the flaring tail to seek from the end of the Worlds to the end of them again, to return again after a hundred years. Man, when thou seest the comet, know that another seeketh besides thee nor ever findeth out.

It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one's own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effects when taken in too large quantities.

Forget Tir-nan-Og?' he exclaimed. 'Forget Tir-nan-Og! With the young men walking with the gold low light on their limbs, and the young girls with radiance in their faces, and the young blossom bursting along the apple-boughs, and all that is young there glorying in the morning, and it morning forever over all the land of youth. Forget Tir-nan-Og!

It was better to be a wild thing in the lovely marshes, than to have a soul that cried for beautiful things and found not one.

For if old women gossiping at evening as the ages go by, spin wisdom as the spider in old barns spins gossamer, then Mrs. Tichener had a great store of wisdom, in which little ancient facts were caught up as is dust in the spider's web. And if these things are all vanity, what are we?

It is very seldom that the same man knows much of science and about the things that were known before science came.

I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.

Everyone's future is, in reality, uncertain and full of unknown treasures from which all may draw unguessed prizes.

There is no beauty or romance or mystery in the sea except for the men that sail abroad upon it, and those who stay at home and dream of them.

I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.

A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.

And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man's thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.

And she would not hold back his limbs when his heart was gone to the woods, for it is ever the way of witches with any two things to care for the more mysterious of the two.