Lorna Sage

"that he cares for nothing except what might commend itself to a virtuoso Pagan, and thinks only as men thought before Christianity awoke them to the consciousness of sin, of suffering, and of immortality."

"... she saw herself to be: a demystifier, a critical observer of social processes and systems, an outsider who could see through to the inside, a radical realist. Lessing's initial creative roots lie in this ..."

"cultivated the role of and/or witch, and — in the (1979) — rewrote the with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute."

"My grandfather was the subject of my best stories. ... He behaved fantastically badly. ... My grandfather was a priest of the Church of England in Wales ... He was, as it turned out, certainly a boozer, a womanizer — this I had always known about him ... He was also, interestingly enough, very much a sort of a disappointed writer ..."

"Grandfather's skirts would flop in the wind along the path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the , excuses for getting out of the (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. ... He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times he had come home pissed and incapable."

"... never frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through ... Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that the communicants got watered-down from Boots the chemist in , over the border."

"life seemed a perpetual-motion machine, or an effect of gravity, something cyclic and unstoppable."

"The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life."