Tom Marcham

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“But we knew that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake; whereas if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at one’s table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck higher up by Beethoven and Mozart.”
― Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

“To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence