“Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.”

Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.

One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.

Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.

The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.

Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.

It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.

The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

Via the squares on the chessboard, the Indians explain the movement of time and the age.

There’s no need to explain anything at length. Let go of love and hate and let things be. That’s all that I do in my own practice.

It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible.

When we cannot look around and explain anything we are the quantum world.

We need to develop meditation so that the understanding arises clearly within oneself. It is not the case that merely by listening to another’s explanation our defilements will disappear.

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.