Unsatisfactory indeed the world seemed to Mr Menheniot. He was pushed — Howard Spring

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

"[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."

"Once I wandered away from my brothers and sisters and went into a near-by field, and right out in the middle of it I lay down in grass so high that no one could see me. The red sorrel from that angle rose like spires and the dog-daisies trembled against the blue with fantastic loveliness. The silence was so great that I could hear the grasses making a small commotion like the trees of a forest in which I was a beetle. I shut my eyes and tried to forget that I was anyone at all. I tried to imagine that I was a stone lying on the ground; and I remember snatching myself up from what must have been something near to unconsciousness and rushing away frightened."