Headlong QUOTES

1 " Odd, though, all these dealings of mine with myself. First I’ve agreed a principle with myself, now I’m making out a case to myself, and debating my own feelings and intentions with myself. Who is this self, this phantom internal partner, with whom I’m entering into all these arrangements? (I ask myself.) "

― Michael Frayn , Headlong

3 " The season that my picture shows, it seems to me now, is the moral equinox, the uncertain days we live in, when light and dark in the world are equally balanced. Or perhaps, more accurately, the weeks just after it, at the start of the old New Year, when the long winter nights behind us are beginning to give place at last to the long summer days ahead. Outside the windows of the train, the northwestern suburbs, too, are full of sunshine, and everywhere there’s the same shimmer of green that’s spreading across the woods in the picture. There’s also a travailler here—me, coming down from the winter air in the high passes, heading for the soft lands of summer, where the ship’s waiting to weigh anchor and set sail for Jerusalem. And what a delight it is to have some great journey to undertake, some great enterprise under way, so that all one’s thoughts and efforts are guided by its onward momentum. Everything we do has bad as well as good in it, dark as well as light, and that includes the enterprise I’m embarked upon now. But the days are drawing out and the nights are drawing in, and I know that the good is going to predominate. "

― Michael Frayn , Headlong