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?

No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.

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’.