Alan Sillitoe
:: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath.
"Everybody thinks they'll never get married at your age ... You think you can go on all your life being single ... but you suddenly find out that you can't."
He felt a lack of security. No place existed in all the world that could be called safe, and he knew for the first time in his life that there had never been any such thing as safety, and never would be, the difference being that now he knew it as a fact, whereas before it was a natural unconscious state.
Mostly you were like a fish: you swam about with freedom, thinking how good it was to be left alone, doing anything you wanted to do and caring about no one, when suddenly: Splutch! - the big hook clapped itself into your mouth and you were caught.