“And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later...”

“Why should they be grateful? They came here looking for something much more. What we gave them, all the years, all the fighting we did on their behalf, what do they know of that? They think it was God-given. Until they came here, they knew nothing of it. All they feel now is disappointment, because we haven't given them everything possible.”

“Looking back now, it's funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment....But the point was, I suppose, we'd all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something that had become special...and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn't ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement.”

“The colonel nodded. "Our childhood seems so far away now. All this" - he gestured out of the vehicle - "so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.""Well, Colonel, it's hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it's where I've continued to live all my life. It's only now I've started to make my journey from it.”

“She thinks I've let myself down,' he was saying. 'But I haven't. I'm doing perfectly okay. Endless horizons are all very well when you're young. But get to your age, you've got to ... you've got to get some perspective. That's what kept going round in my head whenever she got unbearable about it. Perspective, she needs perspective. And I kept saying to myself, look, I'm doing okay. Look at loads of other people, people we know. Look at Ray. Look what a pig's arse he's making of his life. She needs perspective.”

“The point is, there was a gap in Miss Emily's calendar collection: none of them had a single picture of Norfolk. I'd always wonder each lesson if this time she'd found a picture, but it was always the same. She'd wave her pointer over the map and say, as a sort of afterthought: 'And over here, we've got Norfolk. Very nice there.' Then, that particular time, I remember how she paused and drifted off into thought. Eventually she came out of her dream and tapped the map again. 'You see, because it's stuck out here on the east, on this hump jutting into the sea, it's not on the way to anywhere. People going north and south, they bypass it altogether. For that reason, it's a peaceful corner of England, rather nice. But it's also something of a lost corner.' Someone claimed after the lesson that Miss Emily had said Norfolk was England's 'lost corner' because that was were all the lost property found in the country ended up. Ruth said one evening, looking out at the sunset, that 'when we lost something precious, and we'd looked and looked and still couldn't find it, then we didn't have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.”

“There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”