"Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books."

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I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...

— M. F. K. Fisher