Melancholy and remorse form the deep leaden keel which enables us to sail into the wind of reality; we run aground sooner than the flat-bottomed plea… - Cyril Connolly

He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

...there is a way of leaving and yet of not leaving; of hinting that one loves and is willing to return, yet never coming back and so preserving a relationship in a lingering decay.

"A love affair is a grafting operation. "What has once been joined never forgets". There is a moment when the graft takes; up to then it is possible without difficulty the separation which afterwards comes only through breaking off a great hunk of oneself; the ingrown fibre of hours, days, years."