An awareness of one’s own mortality is not necessarily accompanied by a corresponding sense of maturity. John Kinsella is, to all outward appearances, a mature man, but he is precise about how old he feels:’10.’ I laugh. ‘Seriously, I really don’t feel as though my mentality had changed at all in the last 50 odd …
Duncan knew that he and Elliott weren’t the same. Elliott had surely never written about Crowe- or, if he had, the work would almost certainly unpublishable. Duncan also doubted whether Elliott had the emotional maturity to appreciate the breathtaking accomplishment of Juliet (which, as far as Duncan was concerned, was a darker, deeper, more fully …
And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children in order to find out how Vanessa Bell’s life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further …
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands-literally thousands-of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the …