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‘He spoke with his parents in Swedish, and it wasn’t until many years later when a Swedish director he was working with pointed out how affectless his voice became when he switched into the language, that he recognized that he had unconsciously learned to adopt a certain tone when he talked to his parents, one emotionless and blunt, that was meant to echo their own.’

‘ when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.’

‘But time… How time first grounds us and then confound us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagine we were being responsible, but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time… Give us enough time in our best supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainty whimsical.’

‘.. everybody can simply blame everyone else. But my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more of a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it? The question of subjective vs objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

‘ Indeed isn’t the whole business of a scribing responsibility a kind of cop out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is -was-a train of individual responsibilities all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that …’

‘… then put together a way of life on threateningly fuller, than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit’

‘… it was sadly a determination that was fixed only on itself – determined to be determined. Once he got into that state, I think he viewed any kind of compromise as self betrayal, as if his whole being could be eroded and wiped away by the admission of a fault.’

‘My father exerted an emotional monopoly. His happiness tolerated no dissent when he was in a good mood. Everyone was supposed to be delighted to hear his long stories, laugh at his jokes and cheerfully partake in whatever project he had in mind… But whenever he was low or had been wronged, he made everyone pay for it. I have yet to see a face as determined as his was in anger…’

‘Most of us prefer to believe we are the active subjects of our victories, but only the passive objects of our defeats. We triumph, but it is not really we who fail - we are ruined by forces beyond our control.’

DNF - too much farm talk maybe I’ll come back to it someday

I do not want solicitude. I want anger, vituperation, violence. I am like a man w/ an agonizing toothache who despite the pain takes a vindictive pleasure in prodding [..] his tongue again and again deep into the throbbing cavity. I imagine a fist flying out of nowhere and striking me full in the face, I almost feel the thud & hear the nose- bone breaking, then the thought of it affords me a grain of sad satisfaction

.. pinkish-grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.’

‘Usually these days I do not dally before my reflection any longer than is necessary. There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now i am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly disheveled figure in a Hallowe’en man made of sagging

‘Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.’

…They do not speak with voices of the many but rather as members of the privileged few and usually reflect those interests. Wariness is reasonable. After all, the world being the unequal rat race that it is means that even the deepest forms of love must be watched carefully for selfishness and greed.’

‘We human beings are built to love and share stories. It is one of the best ways to connect. Lore transcends difference. And yet storytellers who belong to powerful groups are reasonably met with suspicion because of how the world has been carved up and stratified...

‘I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.’

‘I read them to learn what to think, not how to think for myself.’

I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.