It is hard to do justice to old pleasures that cannot be revived - we seem half to disown our youthful selves, who loved and treasured them.
. . .
[A] man of fanatical habits, who worked each day from eight till four, seen by no one but Herta with her lunch tray; who had, like Brahms or Balzac, a coffee-making device and dosed himself into a mania of production, but then emerged and moved, full of remote benignity, among his family; whose children, even so, lived so much in fear of saying the wrong thing that they barely said anything to him at all.
. . .
Of course sometimes, with the very private ones, you go to the funeral and find the most astonishing people - they'd just compartmentalized their lives, and you had no idea.
. . .
Each person if he was lucky found the place where he could shine, and the person to shine on.
. . .
A man older than himself whom Johnny had sat next to at dinner last week had told him dating apps were tickets to instant sex, and had shown him two that he used, scores of men a mere hundred yards away, always ready. "Not for me," said Johnny; and three days later found himself downloading one, which meant inescapably setting up a profile, a sort of self-portrait — his old holiday snap had its undertow of lost happiness, and he sighed as he tried to define what his interests were.
