My tears [as I started to read Swallows and Amazons] could perhaps have been nostalgia (defined as memories of things that never happened) but I think they were a matter of attachment, as when one is reunited with an attachment person after a period of separation and danger. In the first paragraph of Swallows and Amazons, I was suddenly reunited with an object of attachment. I have read all of Ransome’s children’s books, I think when I was between eight and eleven. I used to own the whole set. I remember them on a bookshelf. They must have been given to me, one by one, by my parents. … My attachment  to these books was made at a time when neither my parents nor I knew anything about. sailing. It must have been Ransome’s books that implanted in me the desire to sail.

—Keith Oatley