“All around us the young and the not so young are dancing, laughing, and drinking with something akin to desperation. It is as if their very lives depend on their having a good time. As if the only way they can banish all the pain, all the loss, all the sadness of the war, is to fill each moment with wild enjoyment. But that very desperation is itself a kind of loss, as if they have misplaced the spontaneous, sincere happiness of old and replaced it with something contrived. Something that is only on the surface. Something pitiful.”
―
Paula Brackston,
The Midnight Witch
