The Strings Are False Quotes

“I concluded to myself that as one gets older one cannot be friends with just anyone. You would think people's minds would get wider, more elastic, but they don't. Quite the contrary.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False

“On Sundays we rode about the country on branches of trees, each with an ashplant for a sword, and tried to use the Malory diction. It was my last open make-believe before my adolescence, after which time, like everyone else, I lived half the time in fantasy, but craftily, deceiving both others and myself. This adult make-believe is something we have foolishly ignored.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False

“Masters to a new boy are always impressive, gradually they shrink, begin to repeat themselves, their mannerisms stand out further and further like Pinnochio's nose, you realise that their intellect is static, you cease to care what they think of you, you write them off as mere 'bleaks', inhuman, bored and embittered.
A young master comes up fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, full of ideas and charm; after a few years the ideas shrivel away, the charm becomes a convention. In order to do their job well they have to become more or less mechanical. The nicest masters are the eccentrics, but these are eccentric before their time in a way which belongs to the old, have little tricks and crotchets dipped in a petrifying stream, spinsters and proud of it.”
― Louis MacNeice, The Strings Are False