“…But we know, don’t we, that many an atom bomb is merely a Mrs Finch? Think of her as a piece of film, wedged deep in the unconscious. We cannot eject her, so we place behind her the powerful light of guilty evasiveness, which projects her upon the screen of the outer world, distorted into the likeness of a bomb. Thus we rid ourselves of an internal mother, by transforming her into an external explosive.”

“Then the atom bomb does not exist?”

“Some of my colleagues say that it doesn’t: they lump it in with the other internal problems, like road-accidents, industrial injuries, cancer, death, and so on. Personally, I’m a middle-of-the-road sort of man: I believe that machinery, and motor-cars in particular, are intrinsically dangerous. I even claim that they have the power of moving quite often in a direction opposite to the one demanded by their victim’s neurosis….”
–Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (this maybe isn’t the best quotation, but I’m really, really enjoying this book)