The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.

And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic homesickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations.

All this had happened before, perhaps a million times, and because of this was doomed. There was no ordinary future any more, only this ecstatic tormented terrified present. The future had passed through the present like a sword. We were already, even eye to eye and lip to lip, deep in the horrors to come.

Now that the doors of possibility had magically opened one after the other, Ludens realised how much comfort he had derived from uncertainty.

I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.

You know when things get inside you and you can't stop going round and round the same piece of misery.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.