E.S.

“A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Imprisonment gives off an unpleasant smell. Remnants of macerating evil thoughts, the effluvia of dirty ideas that have been hanging around too long, the bitter whiff of old regrets. Fresh air, by definition, never enters here. We breathe in our own breath in this bell jar, we share the atmosphere shot through with shards off brown chicken and dark intentions. Our clothes, our sheets and our skin end up saturated with these fumes, and there is no getting used to them. When we return from the exercise yard, and the outside air is halted at the turnstiles, the transition is always sudden, and the vague nausea is there to remind us that we live and breathe in a belly pushing us along in its laborious digestion, and then, when the time comes, it will expel us to free itself, not to give us back our freedom.”
― Jean-Paul Dubois, Not Everybody Lives the Same Way

“All who knew Master Nathaniel would have been not only surprised, but incredulous, had they been told he was not a happy man. Yet such was the case. His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless fear; a fear not always active, for during considerable periods it would lie almost dormant⁠—almost, but never entirely.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“The fairies themselves, tradition taught, were eternally jealous of the solid blessings of mortals, and, clothed in invisibility, would crowd to weddings and wakes and fairs⁠—wherever good victuals, in fact, were to be found⁠—and suck the juices from fruits and meats⁠—in vain, for nothing could make them substantial.

Nor was it only food that they stole. In out-of-the-way country places it was still believed that corpses were but fairy cheats, made to resemble flesh and bone, but without any real substance⁠—otherwise, why should they turn so quickly to dust? But the real person, for which the corpse was but a flimsy substitute, had been carried away by the Fairies, to tend their blue kine and reap their fields of gillyflowers. 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 were carried to Fairyland.

Another tradition said that their only means of communication was poetry and music; and in the country poetry and music were still called “the language of the Silent People.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist