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...There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world. (Part One, 9th section)

I...think about being hungry, being cold, being hurt, being ridiculed, as if it were in another life than this.

This damned room - it's saturated with the past. . . .It's all the rooms I've ever slept in, all the streets I've ever walked in. Now the whole thing moves in an ordered, undulating procession past my eyes. Rooms, streets, streets, rooms. . . .

"It's so easy to make a person who hasn't got anything seem wrong." (chapter 4)

"...Money have pretty face for everybody, but for that man money pretty like pretty self, he can't see nothing else.

There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.

They wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.

It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.

... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals.

Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly. Whether one deals with prehistoric recipes, colonial settlements, or medieval music, it needs great imagination and restraint if the twin perils of artless authenticity and clueless empathy are to be avoided.

Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough; and when you have enough, you have self-respect.

The perceptions of middle age have their own luminosity.

All the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.