1
" At length he threw ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ aside, and opened the door to listen to the night outside, advancing cautiously down the steps into the cloistered quadrangle. Looking up from the stone enclosure, he could see the sky full of innumerable trembling stars, and all he could hear was extravagant sounds at a distance—drunken howling from a far street, something that might have been a revolver shot, and, from somewhere in the College itself, the hysterical crying of a jazz record. Close to all was quiet: the slightest of winds breathed over the grass and around the stone pillars, while from the Master's garden came the restless sound of trees. He wondered if a time would ever come when these things would assure him and seem pleasant. "
― Philip Larkin , Jill
2
" To him it was wild and extravagant, a life that was panoplied and trampling compared with his own: it seemed to him that in their schooldays they had won more than he would ever win during the whole of his life. At first ill-treated, they had lived to be oppressors whose savagest desire could be gratified at once, which was surely the height of ambition. As the picture grew in his mind, he ornamented it with little marginal additions, until in the end the thing was as unreal as a highly-coloured picture of an ancient battle, but he had no inkling of its untruth, and he looked on them with curious respect. The pimply Eddy; Christopher, dark and unshaven as a boxer; the selfish and smiling Patrick, and even Tony Braithwaite—all took on a picturesqueness in his eyes, as if they were veterans of an old war. "
― Philip Larkin , Jill
