Every so often there's a generation likes us, Ian. Our only raison d'être to be blown to pieces in a war we imagine we believe in ideologically. - Paul Scott

I had the impression she had become unconscious of her surroundings and was watching the past flick by like a series of moving pictures, silent, uncaptioned; a gate here, a fence there; doors opening upon rooms sometimes empty, sometimes crowded; and stairs, endless, endless stairs down which one was afraid to go for the terror that awaited one's return.

"Have you literary ambitions of your own?"
"I have dabbled in my time."
"Dabbled?"
Bluntly, salting my own wound, I said "I had no staying power, Mrs Hurst. Not for the things I wanted to do, at any rate. I imagined much, started little, finished nothing and published not at all."
"I think you are too easily discouraged."
"I had no original creative talent. In the field of what might be called literary research I had a sort of painstaking, plodding conscientiousness which simply meant I was well on my way to becoming a hack of sound judgment. A man could go on turning out fatuous tripe until the cows come home without necessarily knowing it."

I was surprised, as one is, I think, whenever the tenuous thread of one's life suddenly connects, as friends, people one would have thought strangers.