"But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets pointing out to them what good money you can earn if you invest in some solid technical training - pharmacology, let's say, or accountancy, or the varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics - there are still, incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing poems, novels, plays!... Here in their midst, George feels a sort of vertigo. Oh God, what will become of them all? What chance have they? Ought I to yell out to them, right now, here, that it's hopeless?
But George knows he can't do that. Because, absurdly, inadequately, in spite of himself almost, he is a representative of the hope. And the hope is not false. No. It's just that George is like a man trying to sell a real diamond for a nickel, on the street. The diamond is protected from all but the tiniest few, because the great hurrying majority can never stop to dare to believe that it could conceivably be real."
- from Christopher Isherwood's wonderful
A Single Man, 1964.
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