What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere.

Elizabeth Hay has intelligence coming out of her fingertips - integrity, insight, and wonder in every paragraph of her writing.She connects. She stirs and provokes.

Complaints about reality are immature.

The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can [...] be closed with a shout of recognition.

And what you do is you go into where your anger is, if you're writing anger, you go into where your hatred is, if you're writing hatred. Your joy is, if you're writing joy. You find the source of the energy that draws hatred, anger, joy, etc., etc., etc. That's what you have to find. That's what you do as an actor and that's what you do as a writer. And you bring people to the page.

They waited. The door did not open. The rain did not stop. The darkness made a tent and covered them completely.

I still maintain that an ordinary human being has the right to be horrified by a mangled body seen on an afternoon walk.