J.L. Carr

If I__ stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.

And, at such a time, for a few of us there will always be a tugging at the heart__nowing a precious moment had gone and we not there. We can ask and ask but we can__ have again what once seemed ours for ever__he way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on belfry floor, a remembered voice, a loved face. They__e gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one__ end_.Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.

People one doesn't care for, even dislike, make most of us feel uneasy when they appeal against their sentence.