"I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions."

"The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation."

Our destination was the little town of -- let us call it Belsen [Watford] ê in Hertfordshire. "Green Hertfordshire", Lamb calls it; but it was not green to a boy bred in County Down. It was flat Hertfordshire, flinty Hertfordshire, Hertfordshire of the yellow soil. There I first knew bitter frost and stinging fog, sweltering heat and thunderstorms on the great scale. ... We bought sweets in drowsy village shops and pottered about on the canal bank or sat at the brow of a railway cutting watching a tunnel-mouth for trains. Hertfordshire came to look less hostile.

I was wrong in supposing that I desired Joy itself. All the value lay in that of which Joy was the desiring. Inexorably Joy proclaimed, "You want something other, outside".