There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.

Oh my life is so awful, it's just so awful to be me, you don't know what it's like waking every morning and finding the whole horror of being yourself still there.

I just can't live an ordinary life, I can't pass the time. I can't organise myself, I don't have ordinary motives any more. I can't even manage my body, when I go to bed I don't know where to put my arms.

Priscilla is in hell. Well, we all are. Life is torture, consciousness is torture. All our little devices are just morphia to stop us from screaming . . . We're each of us screaming away in our own private padded cell.

I don't think she's had much of a life.""Well, a life is a life.""What does that mean?""One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.

Why after two years at that university, he left to study sociology in Birmingham, no one knew clearly. He suddenly, as he said, 'couldn't stand Cambridge'. He wanted to get closer to something — perhaps life. But life continued to reject him.

Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one's life went wrong?

I felt at times, it is hard to describe this, almost mad with guilt, with a sort of general guilt about my whole life.