Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

It's no good. I've been trying to sleep for the last half-hour, and I can't. Writing here is a sort of drug. It's the only thing I look forward to. This afternoon I read what I wrote... And it seemed vivid. I know it seems vivid because my imagination fills in all the bits another person wouldn't understand. I mean, it's vanity. But it seems a sort of magic... And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

I am infinitely strange to myself.

Always we try to put the wild in a cage.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

All novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one.