“To slam the door impulsively on the past, to shed everything down to my last bit of clothing, to break the pattern of my life – that complex design I had been weaving since birth with all its dark threads, its unexplainable symbols set against a conventional background of domestic white and schoolboy blue, all those tangled strands which required the dexterity of a virtuoso to keep flowing – I yearned to take giant military shears to it, snap! bitten off in an instant...”
