Though blind chance took me to a newspaper office, I was happy there a — Howard Spring

"Unsatisfactory indeed the world seemed to Mr Menheniot. He was pushed about in bus queues; he was snapped at by café waitresses. In the Underground unpleasant voices shouted "Hurry along! Hurry along!" and the sight of all these people hurrying along - Why? Where to? - amid clanging gates and roaring wheels, out from and in to holes bored in the earth, left him sick for another way of living. Never, never, he thought, could he be happy in the world about him: the world that the war had knocked sideways and that seemed to his frightened imagination as though it would not be straight again but must topple right over."

"[Swithinbank] had dreamed of this show, and here was the dream come true, because he had made it come. What had I ever dreamed of except to be tucked in under a warm blanket of safety? And what had I ever done to make even that true? Nothing."

"After I had eaten my evening meal I wandered out on to the beach where the tide was coming in sharply, a tumble of white in the darkness. I walked as far as the cliff beyond the beach, and I sat down there on a tussock of sea-pinks, listening to the surge of the water, watching the stars that the clouds covered and unveiled and the cluster of humble lights half a mile away that was Penmael. I felt lonely. My body was warm, but I was chilled to the souls marrow. This was the oddest feeling I had ever known: this loneliness. Aloneness was something else. I had sought it eagerly, welcomed it when found, but I had never been lonely in my aloneness. Now I was so lonely that I could stand it no longer."

"I wasnt an artist of any sort, but I thought I knew something about how artists minds worked, and I didnt believe that to change an external situation had much to do with it. It was what they did with whatever was lying about that mattered."

"I was beginning to see that my whole life had been a flight from the possibility of unearthing the sort of man I really was."

"In the long run, what do we have but our memories?"