“He saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.”

“No one knows anything, really. It's all rented, or borrowed.”

“It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence . . .striking the set of a play, humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. . . But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. . . Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts . . . As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end.”

“It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us.”

“All that's really required is that anything the state does in relation to the arts is laid on the table where we can see it.”

“When he thought of her, it rather amazed him, that he had let that girl with her violin go. Now, of course, he saw that her self-effacing proposal was quite irrelevant. All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them. Love and patience- if only he had had them both at once- would surely have seen them both through.”

“At times this biography made him comfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England; at others he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages - bottled, like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friend, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish. ”