Quotes by Lord Dunsany

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

“Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.”

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.

Our lord is a magic lord as we all desired, and magical things have sought him from over there, and they all obey his hests.It is so, said all but Gazic. And Gazic rose up in a pause of their gladness. Many strange things, he said, have entered our village, coming from over there. And it may be that human folk are best, and the ways of the fields we know.

Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.

Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is traveling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-year-old child. The signposts along the way are all marked Progress.

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.

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the Kings Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that towers wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.(The Hoard Of The Gibbelins)

There passed a child of four, a small girl on a footpath over the fields, going home in the evening to Erl. They looked at each other with round eyes.Hullo, said the child.Hullo, child of men, said the troll.. . . What are you? said the child.A troll of Elfland, answered the troll. So I thought, said the child.Where are you going, child of men? the troll asked.To the houses, the child replied.We dont want to go there, said the troll.N-no, said the child.Come to Elfland, the troll said.The child thought for a while. Other children had gone, and the elves always sent a changeling in their place, so that nobody quite missed them and nobody really knew. She thought awhile of the wonder and wildness of Elfland, and then of her own house.N-no, said the child.Why not? said the troll.Mother made a jam roll this morning, said the child. And she walked on gravely home. Had it not been for that chance jam roll she had gone to Elfland.Jam! said the troll contemptuously and thought of the tarns of Elfland, the great lily-leaves lying flat upon their solemn waters, the huge blue lilies towering into the elf-light above the green deep tarns: for jam this child had forsaken them!

And then he went in the evening up to the nursery and told the boy how his mother was gone for a while to Elfland, to her fathers palace (which may only be told of in song). And, unheeding any words of Orion then, he held on with the brief tale that he had come to tell, and told how Elfland was gone.But that cannot be, said Orion, for I hear the horns of Elfland every day.You can hear them? Alveric said.And the boy replied, I hear them blowing at evening.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.

On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.

I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.

It has always struck me that one of the readiest ways of estimating a countrys regard for law is to notice what arms the officers of the law are carrying: in England it is little batons, in France swords, in many countries revolvers, and in Russia the police used to have artillery.

Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.

Indeed if one had just seen him at the end of the evening with the dusk and the mist of the fenlands close behind him he might have believed that in the dusk and the mist was an army that followed this gay worn confident man. Had the army been there Niv was sane.Had the world accepted that an army was there, still he was sane. But the lonely fancy that had not fact to feed on, nor the fancy of any other for fellowship, was for its loneliness mad.

The years are going by us like huge birds, whom Doom and Destiny and the schemes of God have frightened up out of some old gray marsh.

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumor of Alderics quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderics country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.(The Hoard Of The Gibbelins)

The fear of dogs is deep and universal amongst all that are less than Man.