And then he was off, on the uselessness of drawing from the Antique, the blind worship of the past, the failure to engage in any meaningful way with the realities of modern life and, above all, Tonks’s deplorable tendency to devote too much time to teaching women and useless men.

we all feel guilty. Everybody who survives.” “Do you?” “Every minute of every day.

inside there were the adults being so seriously, conscientiously, determinedly opposed to it all. But it’s the little wild savages

Brueghel; and worse than Brueghel, because they were real.

smell, the most primitive of the senses, the one most closely linked to memory and desire,

in the garden who’ll win, I think

Everything he saw, everything he felt, seemed to be filtered through his memories of the front line, as if a thin wash had been laid over his perceptions of this scene. Columns of sleety rain marched across the fields while, in the distance, gray clouds massed for another attack. Somehow or other, he had to connect with the present, but he found it

some of the best writing about place has been done in exile.

soaring chancel arch of his rib cage, along the flat nave of his belly