Quotes from John Bayley

So much of childhood seems to have been spent in secret, and most of its pleasures came from this. Most of the memories I have of it, too. I already considered life to be far from wonderful—something, indeed, to be avoided as much as one could, like school or games or children's parties. Life, real life, was like a picture that frightened me seriously.

I came on my mother shedding a few tears in the drawing room. My mother had hastily blown her nose and spoken to me in an irritated way—a rare thing for her. I knew she knew she should not have been doing it—such demonstrations either of grief or happiness were not the thing at all—and so I was not upset by her crossness, feeling that we had been caught out, as it were, together, and that we must both do better in future.

But all this means nothing. Gerda is not there. Only in my mind. The mind that is helped and solaced by the same demons, the same friends, who have destroyed the mind of an Iris who is close to me now, closer to me than ever, and yet far away. Walking in a dream, with Iris beside me.

I was not aware of the weaver fish, with its highly poisonous spines, whose venom can cause acute agony, even death when untreated. The wife of Field Marshal Montgomery is thought to have died in this way, after paddling with her children off the east coast. The victor of Alamein was then an unknown major. He is reported never to have mentioned her name again, and he never looked at another woman.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

The happiest marriages are full of alternative lives, lived in the head, unknown to the partner.

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.