What touches me is their naive feeling that everything is possible, their mixture of confidence and ignorance. They flutter about trying to decide between a dozen worlds of art and adventure they imagine to be open to them. (...) All the possibilities, they feel, are opening out for them. Whereas, in truth, everything is about to close in on them. Much of the later dissatisfaction, aggressiveness, secret bitterness, must arrive with the belated realisation of this. They expect too much. They get, in the end, too little. (...) An existence without symbolism, the extra dimension; blunted sensation; everything inside dull and monotonous.

J. B. Priestley