Peter Ackroyd Quotes

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.

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’.