For a small island [Great Britain], the place is remarkably diverse.

Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.

They looked at each other, baffled, in love and hate.

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Together, joined in effort by the burden, they staggered up the last steep of the mountain. Together, they chanted One! Two! Three! and crashed the log on to the great pile. Then they stepped back, laughing with triumphant pleasure.

There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.

We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.