I was just old enough to know that it's good to be alone occasionally.
Tinkering with bicycles suited Joe, who, like most halfwits, had a slight mechanical turn.
When I was as old as seventeen I've sat up late at night with my tongue hanging out of my mouth, practising copperplate by the little oil-lamp on the bedroom table.
Individually they were finished, but their way of life would continue. Their good and evil would remain good and evil. They didn't feel the ground they stood on shifting under their feet.
That feeling that you've got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you'll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there's always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they'll be reducing staff and it's you that'll get the bird - that, I swear, didn't exist in the old life before the war.
When a woman's bumped off, her husband is always the first suspect - which gives you a little side-glimpse of what people really think about marriage.
After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy and joy of life just vanish over-night.
I've got more the prole's attitude towards money. Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week - well, next week is a long way off.
When you've lived with a woman for fifteen years, it's difficult to imagine life without her. She's part of the order of things. I dare say you might find things to object to in the sun and the moon, but do you really want to change them?
They're decent, but their minds have stopped.
Why don't people, instead of the idiocies they do spend their time on, just walk round looking at things?
Everlasting scramble for a bit of cash.
It's a queer experience to go over a bit of country you haven't seen in twenty years. You remember it in great detail, and you remember it all wrong.
Surely that usen't to be there?