Lorna Sage

“The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.”

“Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the the time. They played. THEY were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old.”

“The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.”

“Like many who'd married in the war, my parents were finding it hard to survive the peace. This wasn't because they had discovered that they didn't love each other once their life together wasn't spiced with constant separations and the threat of death. Far from it. But they hadn't chosen each other so much against the social grain that they were tense, self-conscious, embattled, as though something was supposed to go wrong. Their families didn't like their marriage, nor did the village.”

“More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.”