I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice thin… - John Fowles

You have shared your secret. I think you will find it to be an unburdening in many other ways. You have very considerable natural advantages. You have nothing to fear from life. A day will come when these recent unhappy years may seem no more than that cloud-stain over there upon Chesil Bank. You shall stand in sunlight — and smile at your own past sorrows.

I felt both a state of envy and contempt. The yacht itself was not vulgar, but I smelt something vulgar about owning it...A few moments later I set off back to my dull daily penal colony of an existence on the far side of the dream, as Adam left the Garden of Eden perhaps…except I knew there were no Gods, and nothing was going to bar my return...

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors' isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.