Maybe when you care, terribly, painfully, about the shape of the world, and you desire nothing but absolute, radical change, you protect yourself with abstraction, distance.
The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.
Suddenly, she employed those very English weapons: devious good manners and a rapid change of subject.
And that is the loneliness of seeing a different world from that of the people around you. Their lives remain remote from yours. You can see the gulf and they can’t.
Excess is essential to the production of austerity.