[Ida] "...It's a good world if you don't weaken." - Graham Greene

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

[Cubitt hurling insults at Pinky after he refuses to lend him money] The picture Cubitt drew had got nothing to do with him: it was like the pictures men drew of Christ, the image of their own sentimentality. ...He was like a professor describing to a stranger some place he had only read in books:...when all the time it was a country the stranger knew...

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.