Peter Ackroyd Quotes

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last…And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?

He had a fear of the dead, and of all inanimate things, rising up around him to claim him; it is the fear of the preeminently solitary child and solitary man.

And the smell of the library was always the same—the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as ‘the steam of the social soup’.