A Dreamer's Tales

“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.””

— Lord Dunsany

“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.””

— Lord Dunsany

“... and as the sea wind blew on that high and lonely place, there began to slip away from the voter's mind the meaningless phrases that had crowded it long - thumping majority - victory in the fight - terminological inexactitudes - and the smell of paraffin lamps dangling in classrooms, and quotations taken from ancient speeches because the words were long.””

— Lord Dunsany

“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.””

— Lord Dunsany

“And the night deepened over the River Yann, a night all white with stars. And with the night there rose the helmsman's song.””

— Lord Dunsany

“Toldees, Mondath, Arizim, these are the Inner Lands, the lands whose sentinels upon their borders do not behold the sea. Beyond them to the east there lies a desert, for ever untroubled by man: all yellow it is, and spotted with shadows of stones, and Death is in it, like a leopard lying in the sun.””

— Lord Dunsany

“And presently I discerned, though faintly, the souls of a great concourse of cities, all bending over Andelsprutz and comforting her, and the ravines of the mountains roared that night with the voices of cities that had lain still for centuries. For there came the soul of Camelot that had so long ago forsaken Usk; and there was Ilion, all girt with towers, still cursing the sweet face of ruinous Helen; I saw there Babylon and Persepolis, and the bearded face of bull-like Nineveh, and Athens mourning her immortal gods.””

— Lord Dunsany