She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.